T-shirts, hoodies, patches, buttons, keychains, refrigerator magnets, a special ugly edition Xbox 360 console with a wireless headset to match, incredibly tacky controller designs from Todd McFarlane, tiny replica guns that don’t seem to serve any real purpose whatsoever,, and a special edition Mountain Dew flavor. Halo 3 is easily the most hyped game, since, well, Halo 2, and it pretty much lives up to the hype, as well as including a whole load of features no one asked for or even thought of putting on consoles and in FPS games before now.
The long-awaited campaign is definitely the most polished in the series to date, though it isn’t without flaws. Bungie’s level designers are firing on all cylinders here, with only one real dud in the entire lineup. (The eighth level. You know the one.)
The Halo series has always shined in large-scale open-area combat, and Halo 3 is no exception – it ups the ante significantly in both enemy numbers and arena size. Graphically, the game might not be quite as stunning as games like Gears of War or Bioshock, but you see where all that power went when you arrive at some of the title’s larger setpieces. There can be dozens of units and vehicles in a single battle, and it’s glorious. The battles can happen dozens of different ways, and they really showcase the unscripted nature of Bungie’s AI programming and level design, especially when you get stuck at a particularly hard checkpoint. After one death, you might see a few marines decide to take off after a wraith in a warthog, and in another they will decide to go after a fortified turret defended by infantry. It does wonders to keep the game fresh as you play through it, though some ability to control the computer-controlled marines would be welcome.
The game’s smaller infantry-based encounters are a little more complicated. On lower difficulties they are a cakewalk; the computer-controlled marines can take care of things alone in many encounters. Walk through; shoot Brutes; carry on. To a player on normal or easy, they are either filler just some fun mindless shooting. On heroic or legendary, they become almost a tactical grind, requiring careful management of ammunition, equipment, marines and enemy attention to survive.
Equipment is one of Bungie’s new additions to its formula, and it’s a great way to throw a little more flavor into battles. The items integrate smoothly into battles, which is no small feat considering how fine-tuned Halo’s combat is. Bubble shields, which form a protective sphere around the player, can be exactly what you need to move back on the offensive, and power drains, which can both remove enemy shields and disable vehicles from movement, and be incredibly damaging at the right moment. The AI uses these items incessantly, but the player generally has to cast a more careful eye on his supplies.
Halo 3 also introduces an impressive array of new weapons and vehicles. Many of these have an art style reminiscent of the brutes, the game’s replacement for the elites of the first two games. One is a gun that shoots razor sharp spikes, and a new kind of sticky grenade that functions similarly. Unfortunately, these don’t work like Half-Life 2′s crossbow: You can’t pin an enemy corpse to the wall with a well-placed kill shot burst. A welcome addition is the ability to rip a turret off its stand and fire it while walking around. The game’s new vehicles are generally rather unremarkable. A new human air vehicle, the Hornet, functions as sort of an airborne Ghost, as players can strafe side-to-side, and the new Brute Chopper is a motorcycle-esque ground vehicle that can ram stuff to great effect and explosion. All the new weapons and vehicles fit so well into the previous arsenal that you can scarcely imagine the game without them.
The campaign’s narrative is unfortunately quite scatterbrained. It seems at times it is trying to evoke this feeling of danger and the idea that the story may end with Master Chief’s death, but for most of the game it forgets this and is completely focused on the larger happenings with the Prophets and the Flood.
A gripe of mine is that the character of the Arbiter seemingly has no overt motivation other than “don’t die and Brutes suck.” Despite the fact that Master Chief meets the Arbiter in the opening cut scene, the two don’t really exchange dialogue until the beginning of the next level, and they never exchange anything of substance. Some additional lines might have alleviated this particular narrative problem, but Cortana’s story arc in the game builds up to, well, nothing, and it’s highly disappointing.
It also fails to cash in any of the emotional potential that setting the game on Earth could bring. One might have walked through a hospital with civilians in it and overheard them talking, or simply flown over a devastated city, but most of the game’s Earth time is spent on the African savannah. Only once are civilians involved in fighting: A group of construction workers armed with pistols rush a Covenant battle line. They die. It’s underwhelming, to say the least.
I would contend that even Halo 3′s prerelease ad campaign, “Believe,” offered better look at the sort of human cost of war, and it was far surpassed by Halo 2′s landmark “I Love Bees” campaign, which really made you feel like Earth was worth defending. However, humanity has never been the focus of Halo’s actual storyline, though, just its ancillary properties, and this is either an odd choice of Bungie’s or a failure of their storytelling ability. The story of the Forerunners, the Flood and the Covenant comes to a relatively satisfying conclusion, but what has happened to humanity over the course of the war?
Of note is Bungie’s throwback to its old Marathon style of storytelling by including a series of terminals once the player reaches a new location midway through the game. They are reminiscent of Bioshock’s audio diaries and are a welcome addition to the game’s storytelling repertoire. A casual player can ignore them, unlike extended cut scenes, but they are there for anyone who seeks more.
Halo 3′s campaign is designed to have replay value beyond one playthrough. (Most of the game’s Achievements are focused around the single player.) It is the first in the series to offer four player cooperative play over Xbox Live, and, like its predecessors, it offers support up to two players on one console. This experience works very well, and can produce many great moments like one player dropping the other on the back of a scarab to blow it up, then scooping the player back off the top, where the two fly away from the explosion dramatically. Having any number of players also opens up great tactical abilities, but the game can be rather hard on the default settings. Players can turn on skulls, which can be found hidden throughout the campaign, to ratchet up the difficulty and make the experience a challenge for four players.
Bungie’s other addition to the campaign is scoring, like the arcade games of yesteryear. You get a set number of points for killing an each enemy, which can be multiplied by a headshot or a series of kills in short succession. Additionally, the aforementioned skulls can be activated to make the game harder, but lend additional multipliers to the final score. This is a fun feature to turn on for coop, where players can compete for the most kills, and it would be just as fun alone were it not for the lack of leaderboards, an incredibly huge oversight for a title that online play is woven so very deeply into.
Of course, the rest of the online functionality is really second to none. Halo 2′s excellent party system is back and improved, with the ability to switch between the game’s various modes as well as party up with strangers you meet online. It remains the single best way to play with friends online, and Halo 3 is a great game to tie it to.
Halo 3 sports a greater variety of matchmaking playlists than Halo 2, and its multiplayer in general is a refinement of its direct predecessor. It has better balance, generally more interesting maps, and another layer of added gameplay thanks to equipment. In short, matchmaking behaves exactly as you would expect it to.
The multiplayer in general is great fun, but not a huge change from Halo 2, despite what some might have you believe. It’s mainly balance changes and gametype
The real shining jewels of Halo 3′s featureset are the theater system and Forge. The game automatically saves complete replays of every game you play, campaign or multiplayer, and allows you to comb back through them from any angle or speed to capture screenshots or, in the case of multiplayer, short clips of choice moments where you died spectacularly, or made others die even more spectacularly. You can then send these to your Xbox Live friends, or save high-resolution anti-aliased 1080p (in layman’s terms, incredibly good-looking) screenshots on your PC from Bungie.net. Saved films can also be flagged using a Bungie.net account linked to your Xbox Live Gamertag, so that the next time you log in to Halo 3 on your Xbox they will automatically download in the background.
These features are incredible. Ease of use pervades the entire system, so that a friend can e-mail you a link to his triple kill from the previous evening and you can click “download” and then watch a full replay of the action from any angle or perspective. Reiterating, this feature is a sight to behold and unmatched in any other game on the market.
Theater mode isn’t quite perfect, however. The interface makes it difficult to rewind precisely, and rewinding is completely impossible in campaign mode replays. One also can’t fast forward large chunks of time at once, which is quite annoying if you want to capture a screenshot from the end of a two hour campaign session. Still, these features are an incredible technical achievement that is just as incredible for the player. The general polish
The other shining jewel is Forge. In short, Forge is Garry’s Mod lite. For those unfamiliar with Garry’s Mod, Forge allows players to rearrange nearly everything about a level and then save custom layouts and game modes to share with their friends or on Bungie.net alongside their films and screenshots. Though this may not be as complicated as modding tools for various PC games, this is a huge advance in features for consoles and will extend the the life of the title immeasurably. It, like theatre mode, is a revelation in the world of consoles, and compared to any PC solution it is still a revelation in ease of use.
Halo 3 is a great game. It might not be deserving of all the hype, the barrage of 10/10 perfect scores, and 3.3 million in sales in a mere seven days, but it’s an experience few Xbox 360 owners shouldn’t miss, and its featureset is a new high watermark in the industry and redefines the term “complete package.”