Platform: Xbox 306Spoiler Danger Low
The Good
+ The score. Simply amazing, and it does exactly what it needs to do.
+ Best campaign in the history of the franchise.
+ Firefight!!!!
+ Scoped Pistol!
+ Silenced SMG!
- No matchmaking in Firefight.
- Short campaign.
- Hands. The hands rendered with the Halo engine look awful.
When we started hearing about Halo 3: ODST a year or so ago, it was a small game, really an expansion to Halo 3 that would cover a couple of hours of playtime. What we ended up with instead was a complete game experience. A 6-8 hour campaign mission, all the Halo 3 DLC map packs, and a new and addicting multi-player mode called Firefight.
As I was playing through the solo campaign, I found myself often thinking that this is what the first 3 Halo games should have been. This game is gripping and fascinating. The story, with its time-shifting presentation, is exciting has excellent pacing. The city of New Mambosa comes alive in Halo's delightful art style.
The story takes place across two timeframes - You play as the Recruit during the night scenes and play as the rest of his squad during the day scenes. The night scenes in particular are great. They strike a fine balance between the requisite Halo battles and the new and entertaining detective style pieces. Taken together, these pieces breathe a new life into the getting-tired formula used for the first 3 Halos. The night missions also allow you to make great use of the improved visor and interface. And the silenced SMG. And Pistol which has been brought back to its true, Halo 1 glory. Master Chief could only be so lucky to get his hands on such equipment!
I would like to speak a little about the removal of the motion detector. I think this was a great move on the part of Bungie. In Halo 1, the radar was a useful tool, and it was great the first time you saw the Flood and the radar just turned red. I never really cared for it in other Halo games - it felt like I was getting just one more advantage over already-easy enemies. While you can still see approximate enemy positions on the ODST map, it is much less specific and it seems more balanced.
Besides the technical aspects, the night missions have an entirely new feel to them. They take place 6 hours after the initial drop, and the Recruit is tasked with finding out what happened to the rest of his team in the meantime. The dark setting coupled with being totally alone - just one guy and the Covenant - makes for a truly unique and wonderful atmosphere. Couple the visual and story cues with the excellent - beyond excellent, in fact - score, and the night missions become the experience that, for me at least, define the game for me.
The day missions treat us to some typical Halo fare - vehicular combat, explosions, teams, and fast-paced music. While they are exciting in their own right, I often found myself eager to get back to the night time.
I should give another note to Marty O'Donnell here, because the score that he creates, the aural differentiation between the day and night pieces, is truly remarkable. Gone is Master Chief, and so too his themes. What we get in their place is a set of new themes and a new sound (quiet pianos with some jazz sax thrown in), but it still feels entirely like a Halo soundtrack.
What can I say about multiplayer? It's Halo 3 map packs, which add a ton of replayability to the already excellent multiplayer modes. Halo 3 is still one of the biggest games on Xbox Live (second to Modern Warfare 2 I believe), so there's always somebody to play with.
Firefight is the new mode, and it is great. Getting four of your friends together to school wave upon wave of Covenant is the greatest thing to come to Halo multiplayer in... forever. There is one snag, though, and it's a HUGE snag. Firefight does not allow matchmaking. This means that you either have to have friends online willing to hook up, or you go at it by yourself. I really can't think of a good reason why Firefight doesn't have matchmaking, and I can only hope Bungie comes to their senses and patches this soon.
This is a great game, and if you haven't gotten the Legendary and Mythic map packs for Halo 3 yet, the $60 is a sound investment. Heck, between the campaign and the Firefight mode, this was easily worth $60.
Score: 9.3/10.0
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