Halos always one of those love it or hate it games, with this final chapter it's definately a love it and a must own.
Halo is a great series and I'm loving Halo 3.
Is it overrated? Probably. It's not doing too much different then Halo 2 did.
But why fix what ain't broke?
Theres a noticable graphics improovement in there, as you'd expect.
The game looks sharp in pretty much all areas of the game.
This won't change the fact that walking through eerily familiar hallways and areas throughout the campaign is a tad bland, no matter how pretty these clone halls look. To be perfectly honest with you, I've only just begun with the campaign so theres little else I can say about it though it seems to be shaping up to be like Halo 2s. Fun and it advances and in this case concludes (?) the Halo story, but your not going to play through it more then once if you can help it. Fortunately the multiplayer is fun.
My only real complaint lies with that it doesn't seem you can 'matchmake' for custom games. So unless you have like 16 friends or at least are good at making them (which I'm not) your not going to be able to milk the custom games, which arguably is the most fun you have in multiplayer.
I've played some ranked games, albeit only in the Lone Wolf play list as I'm not that good a player and I don't wanna deal with people whining at me if I play a ranked game on their team and stuff up.
I've played some team games on the social play lists however.
Big Team Battles mostly. For 12 players and up.
And it's a blast.
Capture the flag.
Assault. To a lesser extent VIP. Fun game types, to be sure.
Territories I don't find to be fun, but that could well be just me.
Then theres the forge, which you can use to subtley edit your maps.
While the modifications you can make are generally limited to what items are in the map, where they are, where you spawn and stuff like that they can still make for some drastic changes in gameplay and if you're creative you can do a lot with it. Alas, I'm not.
Also theres the theatre which I like and would will that more games in the future make use of such a feature. You see your most recent games in the list and you can go back and watch them. The beauty is it's not just a mere recording. In this playback you can see the action through the ideas of any other player or get an entirely new perspective with the free roam camera.
You can save your matches for later viewing or just snip out a few choice moments to brag about. You can even take screenshots, of which you can then grab off the bungie website and post around to show your friends (or like me, use as wall papers) which is just brilliant and possibly the best new feature in Halo 3.
I'm going to sum up now.
This isn't a game you're going to really buy for the single player.
It'll be fun while it lasts, but you can take comfort in knowing that it offers up some of if not arguably the best multiplayer on the system and in my oppinion, the best Halo game to date.