Short campaign and too much weapon balance makes for a disappointing single player experience.
After reading people mention that the game is way better on heroic, I decided to give it a whirl. I have to agree that it does make a difference. It is a more engaging challenge, although sometimes overly difficult for more casual Halo players like myself. The problem I mention about weapons being too similar and not mattering is not nearly as true in heroic. I still think that many of the weapons are to similar and boring because of it, but at least weapon choice is more important on heroic. And occasionally being tested by doing a hard mission without a good choice in weapons is interesting. The rest of the review is still true. buy Halo 3 if you like multiplayer, but $60 is too much if you just want to play single player. Get Bioshock or HL2 Orange box if you are more into single player experiences.
-END EDIT-
There are tons of reviews from Halo fanatics explaining why Halo 3 is the best game ever made and plenty of Sony fanboy reviews calling it the worst game of all time. I will give a brief review from a much more neutral perspective. I like Halo but am not a hardcore multiplayer addict (due more to the online community than the game itself).
This will not be a full review, just a few points that I feel are important.
-CAMPAIGN
Compared to most Halo gamers, I am pretty much a noob, and I pretty much always play games on their default difficulty the first time. So, on normal difficulty I finished Halo 3 in about 7 hours. Real life time. Gameplay time couldn't have been more than 6 hours. This is just terrible and insulting to the people who look forward to the single player campaign. They made these levels huge and didn't put anything into them that made you use them except for empty space to get lost. There was nothing compelling about the gameplay that kept me excited or really compelled to keep playing other than the desire to shoot things in the face, which almost nay game can satisfy.
-WEAPONS
Very dissapointed. I am sure it has a lot to do with multiplayer balance, but all of the guns felt equally powerful. And with few exceptions, it never really seemed to matter what weapons I was carrying. What is the point of having so many weapons if most of them are just near copies of the other weapons and most of them do not stand out from each other. Finding a shotgun or whatever "rare" weapon is supposed to be exciting. In Halo 3, they mostly just feel like another random weapon and my choice of what to carry was really only based on ammo considerations. That makes me sad:(
-FORGE AND REPLAY
Not my thing but I respect what they add to the experience for more hardcore gamers and my score reflects that. I always appreciate when developers give us great extra things to do in a game.
-MULTIPLAYER
Again, not my thing so much, but Halo is the gold standard for online console multiplayer. Bungie makes a nice variety of quality maps and it is a great experience if you are willing to practice.
-GRAPHICS AND PERFORMANCE
The graphics are solid but not exciting, but I did have performance issues. I experienced a lot of mediocre fps and mini freezes. This is not acceptable in a shooter game and is why pc shooters have so many options to improve performance. I have considered that maybe not everyone has had this problem and it has to do with system cache (which doesn't seem to be officially acknowledged by M$ or developers. I may be wrong, but I've only read about this on forums and there I have found no interface option to clear cache in games or on the console.) but since I did not have this problem with Bioshock, I assume that it wasn't the problem here. I could be wrong as to why, but it did happen and should be mentioned.
-FINAL THOUGHTS
Halo 3 is basically a multiplayer game with a little Campaign attached to it. The campaign is a LOT less satisfying that more dedicated campaign games like Half Life 2 or Bioshock. If I were rating this game solely on single player it would be something pretty terrible like 4/10. I was very disappointed by the extremely short and uninspiring campaign, and the weapons were a letdown. But I understand the many hours that people will get out of the rest of the game and the game gets praise for that. But if you are someone like me who considers the single player experience more important than the multiplayer, you should consider passing on this purchase.