What is LASO in Halo: Reach?

Here’s what you need to know about LASO in Halo: Reach and Halo: The Master Chief Collection

The Halo franchise has generated notable achievements and rites of passage for aspiring players looking to make the game’s campaign more challenge. While players can run through the game on the hardest difficulty, they have the option to make it even harder by turning all of the Skulls on, which modify the gameplay even further.

A notable challenge is called Legendary All Skulls On (LASO), which players have also called Mythic Mode. In it, a player needs to play Halo: Reach from start to finish on Legendary, with all 12 of the skulls activated. It’s a massive challenge, where players test their skills with all of the odds stacked against them from the start.

The achievement tied to it is called Why Do This To Yourself?, and to make sure you unlock it, you need to go Halo: Reach‘s campaign and scroll down to Playlists. It should be the first one, labeled LASO Campaign. You won’t be able to change any of the options when you load it up.

Here are the 12 skulls you have to deal with on top of the Legendary difficulty:

• Black Eye: Your shields only recharge when you melee enemies
• Blind: HUD and weapon display removed from your screen
• Catch: Enemies throw and drop more grenades
• Cowbell: Acceleration from explosions is increased
• Famine: Weapons dropped by AI have half the ammo they usually would.
• Fog: The motion tracker is disabled
• Grunt Birthday Cake: Landing a headshot on a grunt pops out with confetti and “hooray!”
• Iron: Dying in co-op resets you at your last saved checkpoint and dying in solo restarts the level
• IWHBYD: Legendary dialogue in the game becomes more common
• Mythic: Enemies have increased health
• Thunderstorm: Upgrades the rank of most enemies
• Tilt: Enemy resistances and weaknesses are increased
• Tough Luck: Enemies always go berserk, always dive out of the way, and they never flee.

You do have the option to play with a friend, so if you and your buddies want to try to complete this challenge together, you can jump into it at any time.

In Halo: The Master Chief Collection, there is an achievement for completing every LASO playlist across every game in the collection. You earn 30 gamerscore for doing so, and it’s called LASO Master. If you want to grab this achievement, you need to beat a LASO playlist on Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Halo 3, Halo: Reach, and Halo 4.