There is one gaming franchise that has became incredibly successful over the past years. It has made millions of money through its sales and is a gaming series that changed the face of the gaming world forever. I bid you, the Halo series. Halo 1 was one of the first games ever released for the original Xbox and it was in fact received the game of the year award. It had sold an accumulate of five million copy’s world wide and had people stunned in amazement all around the world. Following after Halo 1; Halo 2 had shown up to dominate and had sold more than expected. $6.5 million copy’s of Halo 2 were sold world wide. And now Halo 3 is released and within its first 24 hours of release it had made an impressive $170 million just in the first day. Halo has changed the gaming industry forever and is one of the most anticipated video game titles ever created. Now Halo 3 is finally on store shelves and its time for you to finish the fight once in for all. You’ll notice that the game picks up right after the ending of Halo 2. Master Chief will still be the leading character as you will be playing with him through the entire game. The Arbator is still alive and well, and he will accommodate you on the missions ahead. He sometimes can be helpful in those risky situations and sometimes he can be quite useless. The A.I. for Halo 3 is poorly implemented as the Arbator will sometimes be staring at walls and not helping you fend off your enemies. Same thing goes for the marines, they aren’t exactly the smartest tool in the shed nor are they the most helpful. Expect to see your comrades getting shredded to pieces by your foes and don’t always try to relay on them as they die most quickly. Playing on Legendary especially is where you allies will be completely useless and it will be all up to you to beat the mission. To get the rundown on the Campaign for Halo 3 is that its lacking quite a few things. Playing by yourself through the campaign becomes rather repetitive and strays you to the boredom-ness side of things. The game doesn’t seem to keep you immersed into its setting and storyline, instead playing cooperatively with your friends is the ultimate solution. You can have a total of four players playing over Xbox Live or System Link cooperatively. Playing with four players is rather addicting and amusing. To get the full fledged experience out of the cooperative play is to play the game through the Legendary difficulty mode. The Campaign isn’t to difficult if you are playing along side with your friends because once you die you re-spawn shortly afterwards. Therefore playing on Legendary will be the most exciting and most difficult cooperate play gaming experience in all of the Halo games. Its quite easy to say that the Campaign for Halo 3 is lacking and is probably the worst aspect of the whole game. The storyline isn’t to in depth, the campaign is unfortunately tedious, and its sometimes incomprehensive to what exactly is going on throughout the course of the story. The Campaign is something worth much more improvement, due to its short game play with a whipping seven hours to complete the story on Normal, nine to twelve hours on Heroic and thirteen to fifteen hours on Legendary. Apparently Bungie wasn’t to concentrated on the Campaign, instead they created a excellent online component that made this game totally user-friendly and successful for the most part. Well the Campaign for Halo 3 is somewhat mediocre, but the online multiplayer is where its at my friend. For those people who had the chance to participate in the Halo 3 Beta, people had much speculation and complaints of how “bad” the beta was, people sat back and wondered if Halo 3 was actually going to offer a honorable multiplayer interface. Well your in luck, because Halo 3 well deliveries you one of the best Xbox Live games on the Xbox 360 thus far. The rules haven’t changed much since Halo 2, the same party system but better is still into play and a array of new features have been added as well. Playing along side with your buddies over matchmaking is still plain out fun and exhilarating. Some new additions have in fact been added for the online proportion, such as the new option to customize your online character. You can now choose your own armor for your character be it that they are a Spartan or an Elite. From playing online from the start you’ll notice that you are severely limited on armor choices, however playing through the Campaign and online will help you unlock new armor types to throw onto your character. Halo 3 has signifincally improved on its online component compared to Halo 2. There are several new weapons and vehicles to choose from. Try the Mongoose for instance; the Mongoose is a mini-atv that you can go cruising around the landscape with the option of brining a long a friend with you, that will be sitting around on the back. A new vehicle called the Hornet resembles a mini version of the super sized Pelican. A Hornet is basically a helicopter with a punch of speed, lock on rockets to shoot and a basic machine gun, this vehicle can carry two others along the sides of the Hornet. There is so many new weapons and vehicles that Bungie decided to add that talking about all of them will not only spoil the experience but it will also bore you, the reader. Halo 3 has took a huge leap towards a graphical improvement from its counter part Halo 2. This game definitely offers next-generation graphics that look excellent. Not only has the environment and characters received a new coat of polish but Master Chief looks more detailed then ever. With his new shinning armor glistering from the suns reflecting makes you feel like Master Chief is really alive in this involving world. The graphics are easily noticeable that they look the best out of the whole series. The water effects are realistic looking, the suns glaring effect and the effects of grenades exploding look incredible. All though the frame rate tends to bog down seldomly, it can be forgiving that this occurrence happens rarely. Overall Halo 3 surely deliveries some satisfying graphics. There is a newly crafted feature that has been implemented into Halo 3 and its called the “Forge”. With the “Forge” you are granted access to customize your own personalized maps, however you cannot change around the terrain or environment in anyway but you are instead able to put down any sort of object, weapon, vehicle, etc. on the map. You have a certain budget that may not be acceded over the certain amount of money that you are given. You can make some truly new creative game modes and maps for you and your friends to participate in. While using the Forge Map Editor you are able to have seven other people in simultaneously editing the map. The Forge may be interactive but its kind of disappointing that you cannot change around the terrain, but its within good reasoning that you are not able to do such things. Yet another awesome feature that is in Halo 3 is the Theater. The Theater is probably one of the best new additions added to the series. While playing either online or through the Campaign it will automatically save the first twenty-five recent game play videos that you’ve been through. Once you are done playing you can navigate through the Theater then sit back and watch your recent game play videos. Its plain out fun to watch the videos and be able to pause, fast forward and even re-wind the video as you are watching it. You can even slowly hold the R Trigger which will make the video go through a slow-motion like action. It gets even better when for instance a plasma grenade blows you up while you pause the video; you can then get out of your characters perspective and fly around then take a screenshot. Once you’ve taken some sweet screenshots it will automatically update it to Bungie.net where you can view your pictures. You can even show your screenshots off to your friends over Xbox Live. Here’s something that I know some people will love doing; have you done a sweet no-scope on your friend? Well then watch the video and record that small clip, then brag and send it to your friend. Its always fun to mess around with the Theater in Halo 3 especially if you get to show your friends how badly you massacred them The sound qualities are astonishing especially with a decent set of surround sound speakers. You’ll hear the vast array of new tunes, while gunning down the alien convent and while plowing through those gutsy Brutes. Halo 3’s soundtrack is fairly good, the sounds of your arsenal sound better than before and sounds of vehicles sound believable. Overall Halo 3 deliveries a good sound quality. Halo 3 may be one of the most anticipated titles of any video game on the market, it may have the best online multiplayer over Xbox Live and it may offer some excellent new features. But however Halo 3 doesn’t deserve the perfect score of a 10. Reason being is because the single player has dumped down the rating and could have been potentially better. If Halo 3 had a better single player, with a deeper storyline with an easy to follow story, a longer Campaign and a more exciting Campaign, then Halo 3 could of possibly had the perfect score of 10. Even though Halo 3 doesn’t have the best Campaign, its still a incredible game with a rich replay value. I don’t care who you are because Halo 3 is by all means worth the $60 price and should be purchased if you own a Xbox 360. So if you haven’t all ready bought Halo 3 then go buy it, then finish the fight and I’ll see you online.
Positives + Loads of fun multiplayer features + Wide variety of futuristic weapons + Graphics look great + Epic soundtrack + Variety of fun to drive vechiles Negatives - Without LIVE you won't get nearly as mu... Read Full Review
Not quite as good as it was hyped up to be, but a good waste of 60 bucks. It is definitely a good game, so all you people that are calling it perfect don't get mad, but based on all the hype and CONSTANT advertisements, ... Read Full Review
