Like I said in my review, it was a fun game but let's face it most games are fun. I also said that I rated only the campaign mode which was good enough that I played through it from start to finish without sleeping. I actually stayed up much later than I should have but I was interested in where the story was going to go so I ended up wishing I had just gone to bed early.

The problems with the game are not huge it's just that there are so many of them. Compare ODST to competing FPS's and it's not as good as Halo 3 or Gears of War 2. What it suffers from is the fact that you are not Master Chief but you are expected to play by his rules of run and gun. Except you are frail and Brutes are everywhere. The two just don't mix well because you constantly have to sit around and wait for your stamina, which is your shields, to recover. Health packs are numerous enough that dying isn't really an issue. It's just a mundane play style that was touted as tactical but is anything but. Prairie dogging is a tactic but doing it because you are forced to do so doesn't make it enjoyable nor does it make ODST a Tactical FPS…or the walk to the toilet any better.

Sneaking is great but it's really just a faux mechanic in this game. You can sneak around all you want when covenant are not present but their detection seems to be chance based which makes it just pointless. I was able to sneak up on a group of sleeping Grunts and a Brute and start knocking them off with a well placed melee but halfway threw the squad for no apparent reason they woke up. It wasn't a problem but why on Earth was I able to kill half the squad and not the whole squad? Other times I ran right past sleeping Grunts and not a peep from them. I have woken sleeping Grunts just by being in their proximity though so it really just seems like some idiotic chance based system which again strikes a blow to the Tactical FPS tag.

Lighting and line of sight also seem to play little role in the game. I have been detected by enemy's above me that couldn't possibly see me while I was standing still. Other times I have been in plain site and a patrol walk right past me without notice. I have even been spotted in the pitch black darkness from 40 or 50 yards away and in the light from near 100 yards. How many nails in the Tactical FPS coffin are we going to put in today? Actually it will be several more.

Rainbow Six Vegas 2 is probably the pinnacle Tactical shooter on the market right now. It combines neat little gadgets, customizable weapons, and armor configurations with game mechanics like wall hugging, leaning, and blind fire. ODST has none of these things. It does have a quasi night vision friend or foe HUD that really just makes the dark bearable but turns daylight into the surface of the sun. These two things can't be separated from the other so the FOF highlighting system doesn't function during the meat of the game but only during what ends up being a largely pointless sandbox portion. The FOF system works but there are some strange things that happen with it. Red is enemy, green is friendly, orange is just environment, yellow is intractable, blue is normally loot but there are doors here and there that are blue as well but can't be opened and for some reason they override the other layers at times. It never cause any problems but to look up and see an intractable Palm tree just to discover that it was the door behind it and even then the door wasn't either it just added length to an already long portion of that game that was tacked on just to add length IMHO.

The sand box mode isn't very sand box. There is nothing on the map except for mission objectives, enemies, and stashes. Except in one of the feeds on ODST I saw you were not supposed to have the whole enemy on radar thing but whatever. By the end of the game I used it a lot to skirt enemy patrols and sentry's because fighting them really made no sense. This sandbox mode was a monolith of wasted time that added nothing tangible to the game that couldn't have been done by just adding some cut scene storyline of the rookie arriving at all these locations after each level with the rest of the squad. There just wasn't anything present in this mode that separated it from a time sink. Yeah there were the audio files but most people won't look for them all. That story was more intriguing to me than the actual story of the game and yet I still didn't care enough to look around for them because it wasn't anything special either and nothing else on the map was worth looking around for or drew me in that direction. There should have been sub missions and objectives present in the sandbox map that didn't connect to the story and if I had to guess I will bet there will be with some future DLC but you know what they say, you don't get a second chance to make a first impression.

The story wasn't horrible and I am a huge fan of Nathan Fillion for his character Malcolm Reynolds. I am also a fan of Zoe and Inara but who isn't? The problem is all it did was connect some dots that didn't need connecting. Like we couldn't figure out what the covenant were after when they were carving it out of the surface of the planet…this isn't what Halo needs this is what Too Human needs. Bungie said they were making this game to highlight the human side of the conflict but they made the Rookie totally ambiguous which detracted from the story instead of adding to it. They did a good job with animating the Rookie but since the Rookie never spoke and other than a minor hint as to why (which apparently wasn't because IT couldn't remove ITS helmet since everyone else did so with reckless abandon) it really just didn't help you identify with the character at all. Do you see why? IT isn't something we, as humans, identify with very often. The story actually leaves Humans out of it for the most part and you end up rescuing and allying yourself with some previously unknown Covenant alien that is primarily helpless. It isn't bad per se but it doesn't do anything to add to the game or the series. I am not an RTS fan at all and I enjoyed Halo Wars for both its game play and its story. That just isn't right considering how much I really like FPS's.

The graphics were not very good. They created a bunch of high res cut scene stuff but not for the game, for advertising it. This is why I used the key word over hyped to describe it. In fact, I don't think there was a single rendered cut scene in the whole game. When I jumped in the first thing I did was graze threw the options where I discovered that the graphics used to display the armor customization screen seemed to be downgraded from the industry standard. Yeah I may be spoiled by games like Too Human and Mass Effect but guess what folks…those games are industry leaders in that area. Follow the leader and you will find the cash. It isn't impossible to do but when you are making cookie cutter games then this is what you get. This is exactly what ODST was. Minus the costly pre-rendered cut scenes from the Halo series that actually make those games stories stand out. The game cost the same at the register though. I just recently got threw wasting a solid weekend +2 on Civ Revolutions and that is what Dare looks like, a Civ caricature type avatar. At least she looked reasonable despite her head not fitting into the game at all. Everyone else looked like complete garbage. They should have just kept there helmets on and the glass tinted because from the neck up this game was a joke. Why is that again? There are about 2 dozen alternative game engines right now that have good in game graphics but this isn't one of them.

ODST isn't full of bugs or broken mechanics that normally cause otherwise good games like Too Human to get poor ratings. It suffered from mediocrity in everything it did. Which is why I think it is a poor game. At least Mass Effect, Too Human, and numerous other titles had redeeming qualities that make them fun enough to continue to play threw the issues. ODST has none.