While Halo 3 doesn't push the series or the console first-person shooter genre, it is an enjoyable experience that shoul
If you are unfamiliar with the Halo series at this point, it is a Sci-Fi themed first person shooter where you play the role of the anonymous Spartan Soldier Master Chief. To keep the plot overview short and spoiler free, the game is about a war on a galactic scale between the forces of Earth, The alien religious extremist group the Covenant, and a festering zombie-style race called the Flood (This almost makes the plot sound a lot like the same setup as Star Craft but it is fundamentally different). The Mission is for the Earth forces to keep the Covenant from activating a device called the Halo ring that will cause the destruction of life throughout the planets. The story for the series has been a decent outing in the console games and has spun into a successful series of novels. The story for the most part in this game maintains a good pace.
One very welcome change, while small, to the Halo 3 gameplay is the new controls for the X-Box 360 controller. The actions of the weapon commands are mapped to the two trigger and shoulder buttons. The right trigger is once again the primary fire button. The right shoulder button controls picking up new weapons, reloading the equipped weapon, and for context actions like getting into vehicles, and this works really well. The left side of the controller works the same way when double wielding, when it is not equipped with a weapon, the left trigger is used for throwing grenades and the left button is used for switching grenade types. Another new welcome change is the implementation of support items like the much talked about bubble shield and items that create a fog cloud that depletes a characters shield who is within its field. Although the new changes add a slight new layer to the game experience, the change is only slight. If all a Halo player wants in this new installment is tried and true gameplay it will get exactly that. One will be able to go in and know just what to expect after playing the previous X-Box installments. This makes the game feel a little on the shallow side for a player that is really reaching out to play something new and feel like a next-gen experience.
One could feel this when looking at the game design; it's easy to feel a great sense of deja-vu when playing through the game's multiplayer and single player campaign. On a good note for the game design is the AI. The Covenant troops react in amazing ways with reacting to cover and fire situations. Though the Halo series is known for having AI character that works vary well so this is to be expected. One flaw that carried over from the halo games is the low breadth, repetitive look of the level design. It is still really easy for a player to get lost in the levels of the single player campaign, often getting into ruts of going in circles before finding the next area to move on to. There are other games in the first-person shooter genre that have done a great job with this like the designers at Valve but the design team for halo still hasn't learned new and better tricks.
The Graphics can also be looked at as more of the same. It is true that they now have a beautiful display on high-resolution televisions, but when it comes to this game being a showpiece for the system, it's no Gears of War. The aesthetics of the new visuals only last for so long until it just feels like an expansion of the Halo series rather than it's next big step. Many of the levels just blatantly feel like hi-resolution versions of Halo 1's single player maps. There are some beautiful effects with bloom lighting and reflective metals, but after playing for some time one will feel that vehicles and characters move the same way as they did before in the first two installments. Even with more minor things like being able to see the jags of the polygons on the faces of the human character models, I can't help but feel that the Bungie team could have done more. The sound however is excellent, or should I say the in game sound. When a cut scene in the single player campaign inevitably comes onto the screen there are noticeable sound-mixing issues. The dialogue that the characters say can sometimes be strained out by the music or sound effects, which is a shame to miss out on some of the remarkable voice performances by people such as Keith David.
Yet with all that said, is more of the same always a bad thing? Not when you have great gameplay and a cool consistent style. Much of this cool returning success of this game package comes in the multiplayer. This is a game series praised for its narrative and single player campaign, but totally adored for its multiplayer. The maximum number of players for multiplayer both online and offline is once again 16. One could say that this is less than what other current-gen shooters are starting to support, but let's be honest, 16 is plenty. You will be able to go with the usual multiplayer modes like slayer and team slayer, and once again are given the freedom to create your own game modes for multiplayer scenarios. The new addition, which much value to the package, is the forge mode. This mode lets you manipulate map settings for the currently existing maps such as vehicle, weapon, pick-ups, and grav-lift placements. This in itself with enough time to play around with feels like a game all in itself and fans old and new to the series will find much of enjoyment out of.
In conclusion, Bungie delivers by doing what they have always done and adding a few new things to it. It's hard to fault the developers for taking a conservative approach to the games design since the series has seen so much success, and it is sure to see more success with this latest outing. Yet for something really new to hit the series, fans might have to gather hopes for Halo 4.
Gameplay: 10
Graphics: 8
Sound: 8
Tilt: 8
Value: 10
Score: 8.8