Review: Halo 3

Gameplay: 8
Sound: 10
Graphics: 9
Value: 9
Overall: 9.6

The Good:
· A fantastic conclusion to the Halo trilogy
· Extremely atmospheric
· Great choice of multiplayer

The Bad:
· Online community is retarded

It’s been a long, long time since the last epic outing with our head strong protagonist Master Chief back on the original Xbox, and ever since the launch of Microsoft’s new console the Xbox 360 they’ve been heavily promoting the final game in the Halo trilogy that would make its debut on the next generation system.

Regardless of whether you played the first two games, if you own a 360 you’ve probably seen Halo 3 and thought God damn I need to play this. The terrible cliff-hanger ending in Halo 2 left Halo fans dying to know if the Chief would “finish the fight” (Microsoft’s slogan for Halo 3) and by god you do, and the way in which you do it is epic, dramatic, fast paced and totally insane.

The story in Halo 3 picks up straight after the events in Halo 2, with our hero the Spartan landing on Earth and along with your newly found ally the Arbiter and of course the rest of the Earth defenses, you progress through missions one to nine to a dramatic and epic conclusion. I’ll say it right now: If you’re worried that the ending of Halo 3 will be like Halo 2’s, you have no need to panic. The ending to the game raps up the story nicely, leaving little room for wanting more (although there’s always room for wanting more when it comes to Halo).

The first of the nine missions in Halo 3 acts as the games tutorial and introduces the player to the basic mechanics needed to play the game. Movement is on the left stick, camera on the right. The right trigger shoots and the left throws grenades. The B button houses the obligatory melee punch and finally Bungie have given us something to do on the X button and that is the ability to deploy “equipment”.

“Equipment” is one of the new features that separates Halo 3 from the previous two installments in the franchise. It enables you, with a quick press of the X button, to deploy objects such as temporary cover, man canons, which fly you across the map if you stand on one, and bubble shields. Bubble shields are probably the best piece of “equipment”. They make an impenetrable spherical shield where, if you stand inside it, you are practically invincible because bullets can’t penetrate it and unless an enemy comes up and melees you up close you’ll be safe from harm.

Another cool new feature to the standard Halo formula is the ability to tear mounted weapons from their stations. When you do this, the camera pulls back into a third person perspective and the Chief moves a little bit slower. This creates the balance in the game play that the Halo franchise series is known for, because yes, your weapon will be much more powerful, but the ammo will be limited and your movement will be decreases. I’d advise keeping away from using these weapons on the harder difficulty settings because the enemy AI in Halo 3 is so good it knows you’ll be venerable when you’re using them, and will take full advantage of your disability. Beware, you’ve been warned!

Yes, the guys over at Bungie have really stepped it up by several notches in terms of enemy artificial intelligence (AI). The grunts still shout insane comments when you fight them, phrases like: “That was my best friend” and “Oh my God my ass!”. It really is a blast to take on these foes and the huge amounts of dialogue, over a thousand per character, keep the action fresh, because we all know how irritating it gets when you hear “grenade out!” over and over again, it makes you want to kill yourself. For real. Unfortunately, it’s apparent that Bungie felt it unnecessary to put the same amount of effort into the friendly AI. Do not, I repeat, DO NOT allow your friendly AI to drive for you, you’ll find yourself smashing into walls and going round in circles over and over again.

Believe me when I say this though, the best thing about Halo 3 is the ability to play co-operatively over Xbox live with up to four people at a time. I’m telling you know, this is the most fun part about the Halo 3 experience. Just imagine it, you and your friends all get into a Warthog, you driving, two people shooting and another on the turret…you have no idea how much more fun driving around and taking dudes out is when there’s more than one of you, and the best thing about it is, you can play the whole single player campaign in this way so give it a try, if you have Xbox live you need to give this a go.

In the last paragraph I mentioned the Warthog, Halo’s signature vehicle. Yes, it’s back in Halo 3 along with the Ghosts, Banshees and Scorpions, just a sample of the vehicles that make the Halo franchise stand out from any other shooter. The enemies in Halo 3 are the Brutes and so yes—there’ll be a tone more vehicles that you’ve never seen before to play with in Halo 3, and they are cool. I mean cool! I don’t want to spoil them for you, so just trust me when I say you’ll really be able to tear things up when you get into the seat of one of them.

Halo 3. The campaign is superb, if slightly on the short side, running at around 6 or 7 hours on the easier difficulty settings, but obviously on the harder modes you’ll be looking at around 10 hours even for a seasoned FPS fan so not much to complain about there. So that’s the single player, but what about the multiplayer I hear you ask? Don’t worry, It’s all there! Halo 2 set the bar for what a good comprehensive console multiplayer should look and play like and yet again Bungie have lifted that bar. The menus and ways you get into a match n the game are pretty similar, although they are slightly confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it you should be fine with it. The modes from Halo 2 are still there. Yu have your death match and team death match which are still referred to as slayer and team slayer and then you have some newer models like Odd ball which sees all of the players chasing after a skull that’s placed randomly onto a map. Once the player has the skull, your job is to stay alive whilst you rack up the points. Obviously your objective there is to stay alive and in possession for as long as possible, it’s a little bit like king of the hill (also present in the game) except that the “hill” is the skull and you can move around with it. So yes, Halo 3 has an amazing multiplayer with support for up to 16 players at one time in player or ranked matches.
So far you’ve heard mostly good things about Halo 3, but nothing that suggest the high score that I’ve given it. Now I’m going to explain where the “.6” comes from in the “9.6”. There are two things in Halo 3 that set it apart from any other console game out there at the moment. The most underestimated one of these is called Forge. This is simply put a map editor, except that it doesn’t allow you to change the actual map geometry. Sounds dumb doesn’t it? Think again, forge mode is actually like multiplayer, so imagine this situation. You and your friends are messing around in forge and all of a sudden you see tree of them zooming towards you in a warthog. Usually you’d try to shoot them with what you’ve got but inevitably die in the process, well fear not! Now, you see then zooming towards you so you hit the edit button and you fly into edit mode, where you quickly spawn a grenade launcher in front of you. Quickly you leave the editing mode and pick up the rocket launcher, hit the right trigger and blow the hell out of your friends! Forge is essentially a cheat mode, except that all of the cheating is allowed! Good times…

Now, what, do I hear you say, could make this situation any better? How about a way to save and view anything you’ve done in your game, whether it be in the campaign, multiplayer or forge. Yes, Halo 3 has a save film functionality! Lets use that example again. So you’re in forge mode and you blow up your friends in the Warthog with a rocket launcher and you decide that it was too amazing to let it just slip away without reminding them about it every day thereafter. It’s genius really, the game actually saves as you play it, not as a movie file, but as a game file so it’s really small in size. You can go into the theatre and watch through all of the stuff you did in forge for the last couple of hours. You can pause, rewind fast forward the game to get to that sweet moment where you blow up that warthog and pause it to take a photograph or crop the film and save only that part of it. You can even detach yourself from the camera and move around the map freely observing all from above!

Once you have your photograph or video, you can do several things with it. Firstly, you can simply save it and allow people on your friends list to view it. Secondly, you can save it and allow anyone on the game to view it. This is especially cool if you’ve just found a cool new way of taking a group of dudes out in the campaign. Thirdly, you can upload it onto the Bungie website,

www.bungie.net so people on the PC can see what you’ve done and download it.

It is this user created content, whether it be new map variants created on forge mode, uploaded videos on bungie.net or even just photographs of some of your greatest headshots online, that make Halo 3 special. No other game allows you to do so much for the community so easily and share it with everyone else. Halo 3 truly is a next generation game and sets the bar for the amount of user generated content that should be standard in any good shooter.

Halo’s music needs no “amping” up. Everyone knows that the soundtrack to Halo is totally fantastic. There’s not much else to say about it except that you’ll hear all of the classics including everyone’s favorite Truth and reconciliation and some new ones. The tracks kick in at precisely the right time and as per usual they’ll send shivers down your spine on frequent occasions.

With great visual style, steady frame rates throughout, good HD quality, little clipping, a stunning musical score and a solid draw distance (how far you can see in the distance) Halo 3 understands the needs of any Xbox 360 owner and trust me when I say you will not be disappointed if you buy Halo 3, far from it in fact, the game gives you more content despite, it’s short campaign length, than any other shooter out there on the market and you should most definitely listen to me when I say: It’s time to finish the fight!

--Tom Rhodes, 360Stage Editor--