Just about three years after gamers were left with one of the rudest game endings ever, they are now able to go out and finish what was started on the 9th November 2004. With the help of hindsight, it can be seen that a lot of the early critical acclaim for Halo 2 probably came from the largest hype machine ever seen behind a game. Still, one could hardly fault the success of Halo 2, as it was easily the most successful game on the Xbox and it created one of the largest online gaming communities seen on a console. Dubbed by Microsoft as the biggest entertainment release of the year, Halo 3 is here now, and we have our final verdict.
What we’ll say about the single player campaign in Halo 3, is that the story indeed comes to an end, and ties the trilogy together quite well. We won’t give any of it away, as it still has some twists and is presented in the wonderful cinematic style that the series is known for. The excellent presentation helps immensely, as the story (on the surface) doesn’t do that much more then your typical ‘bald-headed space marine’ flick. All the references, insights and nuances are thrown at you a little too quickly to be immediately apparent and some fall on their face, though there is a brilliant one at the absolute beginning. Whereas Halo 2 provided roughly three-quarters of a story, Halo 3 provides another three-quarters, so you’re left with some rather obvious filler material. That and Halo 3 is really just finishing off what Halo 2 started. It’s good and it works well, but its not as fleshed out as you’d expect from a stand alone release. In a way, the Halo trilogy is akin to the Matrix trilogy. If you’re memory is a bit hazy and you haven’t played through Halo and/or Halo 2 in while, you’d be well off taking them for a spin just before going through Halo 3. If you’re late to the party, you really should play the predecessors first.
As mentioned, the single player literally kicks off where Halo 2 left things. Master Chief and the Arbiter finally get acquainted and the two are off to cause a whole lot of havoc. The first thing that you’ll notice is that the environments have been spruced up really nicely. Throughout the game’s nine missions, there is a much greater variety among the levels than has been seen in the previous games. They are much more luscious and vibrant, yet still manage to maintain the scope of the previous games, so expect plenty more ogling at the sky. The first mission is actually very well designed, as you’ll get to a complex that has at least four ways of being approached, all without getting the player lost.
Dream team.
Unfortunately, the experience degrades slightly from there, as the rest of the eight missions are actually quite linear in comparison. To an extent it works well. The design and environment variety means that you will no longer get lost as easily, though you’ll still be required to backtrack on occasion. On the other hand, the linearity is particularly noticeable in the middle of the game. Things pick back up a little bit in the third quarter, only to be thrown out the window in the penultimate level, which we found to be quite poor actually. In terms of grandeur and scope, there are moments where Halo 3 succeeds in surpassing its predecessors, but at other times, it feels like the same game that we’ve now been playing for nearly six years. That’s not really a surprise, as Bungie’s Marathon games were quite similar across the board as well.
There have been some new additions to the game in the form new weapons and vehicles. There aren’t many new vehicles though, and you’ll probably end up spending most of the time in Warthogs either way, but there are some good additions to the weaponry. Our favourite was the Gravity Hammer, wielded by Elite Brutes (and not accessible to the player in Halo 2), which sends anything that you hit with it flying into the never-never. The Spartan laser is quite robust as well, though it does require some mastery. You’ve also got some items that were first introduced in the multiplayer beta, these include the bubble shield, cloak and radio disrupter. They don’t revolutionise the gameplay, but they do add a little something else to think about.
At it’s core, Halo has been about the close quarters combat against tough AI. A lot of the enemy patterns have improved, and new behaviours include Grunts sticking plasma grenades to themselves and going kamikaze. The same can’t be said for your allies, as their AI is borderline useless. Four will jump on the Scorpion with you; none will make it to the other end. Throughout the single player, you’re often left to play Rambo, as your AI partners are too slow to catch up, or dead. Riding the Warthog is about the only time they can shoot straight, but they sure as heck can’t drive to save themselves. The Arbiter is the only one that can hold his own but even then you’ll probably be seeing him re-spawn a lot. All said and told, the campaign is not particularly long. As mentioned above, its really finishing off what was started in Halo 2 and a lot of Halo veterans are likely to clock it in under 10 hours (it took us under 8 on normal difficulty).
Single player starts off with a bang.
So the single player doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it does do what its meant to do very well. We felt that it was better than Halo 2 but didn’t quite have the same impact as the original Halo, despite the streamlining. You’ve also got a couple of extras such as ‘skull hunting’ and the option to turn on a scoring mode (where kills and whatnot add up to give a final score). As much as we may argue on the failings of the friendly AI, it was clear that the campaign was meant for you to have a buddy to tag along. Two-player co-op is, for the most part, how the game was meant to be played. It’s about combating the enemies through tactical communication, and now you can even have two more buddies jump in for the whole ride, across Xbox Live. The only gripe with having four-player co-op is that the game doesn’t make any concessions for the extra players. Where the single player will be difficult, the co-op makes it much easier, particularly if all the players Halo veterans. Not only that, but things are easier given that fallen allies respawn much quicker, and there are some portions in the game where four players make the place pretty crowded. Still, it’s tremendously enjoyable to blast through with friends, even if it is a little tight sometimes.
Moving on from the campaign, we get to the multiplayer. As mentioned, Halo 2, for all its campaign flaws, housed the most comprehensive and populated multiplayer experience found on a console. Sure, if you joined late, you we’re likely to be subjected to a lot of punishment from experienced players and a whole lot of smack talk from prepubescent punks. If you were not American, you were also subjected to lag. Hopefully, these have been rectified with what Bungie are touting as an “excellent†network code and player’s ranking system. Hopefully, the ranking system will now be able to cater for those who play 24-7 and those who want to kill an hour or two after work. Still, the best experience will be if you can get together friends (or acquaintances, at least) and blast through till the early hours of the morning.
While there are only eleven maps, most of them are well designed. A couple have been seen in the multiplayer beta and two are really just renames. On top of a good design, you have a plethora of modes to choose from. While you certainly can’t complain about the variety, past experience would suggest that even with a large selection of modes, players will tend to stick with the familiar modes anyway. Apart from the weapons, items and vehicular additions, there isn’t much that has been changed in the conventional multiplayer. It felt a bit more polished and a few aspects of the balance felt a bit tighter but overall, it’s a very familiar experience. It’s still blue versus red. One noticeable change was that when two light swords collide, they’ll both take some damage and be forced to face off again.
So far, you have a well-built and solid experience in the campaign and multiplayer but apart from the ending, you won’t see anything that hasn’t been done before. We new get to the newest additions in Halo 3, that of the Theatre and Forge. Long before these modes came along, you could find a lot of home movies of people playing around with the Halo physics engine. Bungie have decided to take advantage of this and the burgeoning community and provide something that has never been seen on a console FPS. Sure PC enthusiasts have been doing this for years and years but this is one of the first times that such a feature has been accessible to the casual side of the FPS market.
Gravity Hammer = win.
First off, the Theatre records pretty much every session that you spend in the game. It stores in immediate memory roughly the first 25 or so and covers the campaign, multiplayer and Forge. So if you play a mission, you’ll then find that a movie of your playtime is stored in the Theatre. Within these movies, you got entire freedom of choice of which angle you want to view the action from. It really allows for an appreciation of what is going on in the big picture. Furthermore, you can capture movies and screenshots of all the crazy and brilliant moments, stunts and stuffing around that will undoubtedly be going on. Not only are the movies amazingly small in size (a couple of megs at most) but they can be uploaded onto the internet for all to view. That’s community for you. However, there is one crucial flaw in this mode. That is, the rewind and fast-forward really don’t work that well. It’s a real pain to navigate through movies, particularly through long movies. It’s something that’s likely to be addressed in an update, but why it wasn’t rectified beforehand we don’t know.
This brings us to Forge. As most will have probably read by now, Forge is the mode that has the potential to ‘make’ Halo 3. In short, Forge does make Halo 3. Essentially, Forge is a map editor. You may think, well so what? Map editors have been done before. Yes, but Forge can edit on the go and literally in the middle of a game. So effectively, you can play it as a map editor or as another game mode entirely. While you can’t change any of the fixtures in the level i.e. walls and buildings, you can remove, add and change anything that isn’t a part of the groundwork. That is, you can add any weapons into the map, vehicles, teleporters, spawn points and even explosive barrels and the like. Later, you can also customise pick ups and goals. Not only can you sit back, fix up a few maps and then upload them online for all to enjoy but you can get together with buddies and come up with a whole lot of shenanigans with the physics engine.
Basically, this mode opens the floor to a plethora of gameplay options. For example, one player could be providing the team with weapon drops or hazards to quell the opposition. Given the amount of items that are there to be dropped, there certainly are a large number of options at the player’s disposal, but players who are ‘forging’, will still be vulnerable to attack. While modes like this have been around for a while on PC’s, again, it’s one of the first times that it’s been available so freely to everyone and certainly one of the first to be played on the fly, though it will take a little getting used to. There are a lot suggestions for user-made gameplay modes already out there and there are sure to be many more in the coming days, weeks and months. We suggest a combination of the Mongoose and Gravity Hammer. The only concern with such a mode is that it will eventually be cast aside as a novelty. Regardless of this, Forge and the Theatre add the edge that Halo 3 needed to lift it from being Halo 2.5, to a community-rich online gaming experience.
Just when you thought it was getting quiet.
The most bittersweet aspect of the game is the graphics. While they are an improvement from what we saw in the multiplayer beta and they certainly look good, they will be surpassed in the lifetime of the Xbox 360, if they haven’t been already. We were pleased with the newfound vibrancy, life and variety in the environments and the design is among the strongest of the series. Certainly, the design in most buildings is great, but some of the more organic fixtures look like they need a little something extra. Thankfully, the game manages to retain its scope, though it’s not fully realised until the latter half of the campaign. Some aspects, such as some of the character models, texture work and animations seem to have needed more work or have been ported over from the Xbox. That said, while we can understand that Halo 3 isn’t a graphical revelation, at least it manages to remain consistent with the rest of the series. Still, despite the minor graphical hitches that were common in previous games, it’s very good looking game in both the single player and multiplayer. It’s got good explosions, so that counts for something!
On to a consistent highlight of the Halo trilogy – the sound and music. Bungie would be foolish to change this aspect too much, but even though it’s familiar, it works a charm. The music is an outstanding mix of old, new, and remixes of the old, and the musical pieces are unlike anything else ever heard in an FPS. It’s a shame that they’re only intermittent. The dialogue is reasonably sharp, and even though it doesn’t always have a lot to work with other than army speak, it gets endearing when it needs to. The voicing is solid, though a few seem out of place. Funnily enough, it’s the Covenant that deliver the best in-game dialogue, as they get some rather deep conversations as you get close to them. Sound effects haven’t changed much since Halo but then again, they didn’t need to.
In conclusion, if you were to take the campaign and basic multiplayer of Halo 3, you’ve got an experience that is rather similar to its predecessors. It’s certainly better in parts but there are still areas that it could have been improved on. The Halo gameplay is certainly not as infallible as its critically made out to be and if you didn’t ever like it, there’s little chance of Halo 3 changing you mind. Despite the short campaign (at least it finishes this time), breezy co-op and same-y multiplayer, taking Halo 3 as a package reveals what its meant to be. The Forge and Theatre modes redefine what it is to make a game “for the fansâ€, as they are substantial and influential additions to the game and have the potential to build Halo 3 even further then it has ever been before. It’s obvious that Halo 3 is about satisfying the community that has been built since 2001 on as many levels as possible. Be they casual or hardcore, Bungie certainly got it right. Halo 3 certainly won’t be the greatest game ever released and it won’t fulfill its premise without an Xbox Live connection, but as a game and multiplayer package for those who just want Halo, Bungie have hit the nail on the head.
