Halo 3 (Xbox 360)

Hi and welcome to my Halo 3 review.

Since I have a lot to talk about, I will jump straight in! :)

Halo 3 has the curse and the blessing of being positively the most hyped game in existence. The blessing of course is that, no matter what, the game will sell by the bucketload, as many gamers want to "Finish the Fight" that was started in Halo and Halo 2 (which had a very annoying cliff hanger). The game is also ...
...is that the two previous Halo games have been great successes and very good games that have left gamers wanting more.

This is the curse of course. Anything that is over hyped, tends to disappoint many, more times than not. This may not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the product, but rather the insane expectations of those eagerly awaiting it. So, does Halo 3 meet these lofty expectations?

Yes, and ... more

Hi and welcome to my Halo 3 review.

Since I have a lot to talk about, I will jump straight in! :)

Halo 3 has the curse and the blessing of being positively the most hyped game in existence. The blessing of course is that, no matter what, the game will sell by the bucketload, as many gamers want to "Finish the Fight" that was started in Halo and Halo 2 (which had a very annoying cliff hanger). The game is also hyped because basically it is Microsoft's ace in the hole for this generations "console war", the game that can help them shift a lot more consoles than the opposition, the immense marketing campaign clearly illustrates this. Already reports are that it is doing all this and more, sales wise, so they are obviously very happy about it. Another reason is that the two previous Halo games have been great successes and very good games that have left gamers wanting more.

This is the curse of course. Anything that is over hyped, tends to disappoint many, more times than not. This may not necessarily have anything to do with the quality of the product, but rather the insane expectations of those eagerly awaiting it. So, does Halo 3 meet these lofty expectations?

Yes, and no, but mostly yes. :D

Halo 3 is a huge game. There is simply so much to it. If you are sick of playing games that you feel short changed with, you will be very happy with Halo 3, the disc is positively jam packed full with features, with many more features available to you over Xbox Live and the developer's community website Bungie.net.

Let's take a look at everything Halo 3 offers in turn, shall we? The different parts of Halo 3 I will be looking at in this review are as follows:

Features
---------------------------
Story
Single Player
Online Co-op
Multiplayer
Forge and Custom Games
Saved Films
Bungie.net

Overall
---------------------------
Graphics
Sound



Longevity

So thats basically how this review is structured. As there are so many aspects to this game, and I felt that I really should cover each of these aspects, this review is quite long. If you make it through the whole review then I thank you for your patience, but if you would rather look at the aspects that are most important to you, then I completely understand! :)
OK, lets get stuck in!

Story
---------------------------
I don't want to touch too much on the story here as to explain it, may spoil the game for some people, so instead I will just say the following about the Halo story as a whole... It is the year 2552 and humans have been at a long war with a collective alien civilisation known as the Covenant, a highly religious yet warlike species who believe that Humanity is a heresy against their religion. Their religion is based on the belief that a "Great Journey" awaits them and that this journey can only begin with the firing of a number of ring like weapons that cover the galaxy. Known as Halos. In the first game, we see the series' main character, Master Chief, a genetically modified super soldier with state of the art advanced armour, destroying one of these Halos. We find out the real reason for the Halos' creation by a long gone civilisation: The deadly Flood. The Flood is a parasitic entity that seeks to devour all life in the galaxy and has found both the humans and the Covenant. Halo 2 sees the Covenant activating a second Halo, which put the remaining installations in a state of emergency standby and are now primed to fire. Halo 3 sees the Covenant coming to Earth to unearth a mysterious artifact that holds the key to the firing of the remaining Halos, and Master Chief returns to "Finish the Fight".

Single Player
---------------------------
The single player is for many, the whole reason for buying Halo 3. The previous 2 games had great single player campaigns, although many were slightly disappointed with some of the design and story decisions by Bungie (the developer) in the second game. So, Halo 3 is caught in the difficult position of having to both stay true to the original game, yet surpassing both it and the second game. It required a fine balance, but I am very happy to say that Bungie have pulled it off.

I don't want to go into too much detail about the games plot, but I will touch on some of the levels in the game as this has been really the only aspect that people could find fault with in the Halo series. The original Halo had a good single player campaign but many felt that some of the levels repeated themselves somewhat, and in Halo 2, Bungie tried to counter this by providing a great variety of, albeit shorter levels. In Halo 3 we finally have a combination of variety without sacrificing the length of the levels.

The great thing about Halo 3 is that the pace and style of the game can change so drastically inside one single level. At one time you may be indoors using your close quarters tactics with a shotgun in hand, finding cover behind crates or walls, and in the very next instant you may be taking a vehicle outside onto rolling plains as you dodge fire from enemy dropships and turrets as you hurtle towards your next destination, which may then involve you taking into the skies and dog fighting with the enemies dropships (Phantoms) and fighters (Banshees). The sense of scale in these sections is literally second to none and in many of these sections you really have a great level of freedom in how you tackle the games confrontations.

The single player is only slightly let down by one level in the later stages in the game, which is so frustrating you just want to get it over and done with. But it serves really only as a plot device and doesn't really last all that long in comparison to the better levels, thankfully.

I also found the single player campaign as a whole somewhat short. Its the same length of its predecessors but I really expected it to be a little bit longer, given the fact that we waited three years for this. In my enthusiasm, I had the game finished inside two days on the "Heroic Difficulty" (recommended for anyone experienced with Halo or First Person Shooters in general), although I will admit I wanted to finish it as quickly as possible before I accidentally overheard any spoilers, readers of the most recent Harry Potter can surely understand this. :)

I'd say overall, the game lasted around 15-16 hours on this difficulty level, which Bungie themselves have said "is the way the game is meant to be played", and 15 hours is about the norm these days, but there is a lot of reason to replay the game with various collectibles to be found and scores to be improved upon, but more on this later. Easier difficulty levels of course may shorten the single player's duration somewhat as the enemies are less smart and plentiful and you require less tactical approaches to the various confrontations. On Heroic difficulty, one group of enemies and I had a shootout for what must have been 20 minutes alone, and I even had the added pressure on this occasion to get them beaten quickly as my girlfriend was complaining about the noise, "I'm doing my best", I would say, as I reloaded the rocket launcher to teach the enemies to be silent. Suffice to say, that didn't go down so well either...

This brings me neatly onto my next point. The Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) of the enemies is some of the greatest I have seen. Especially on Heroic difficulty (FYI: Easy, Normal, Heroic, Legendary are the difficulties), the enemies will constantly try to outflank you or hunt you down, and will never just stand there and get shot at, they will dodge fire, take cover, climb up on objects or terrain to get a better angle at you, and will jump to avoid grenades (unless you "stick" them with one of the games sticky "Plasma Grenades" in which case they will either panic or run straight at you in an attempt to take you with them). There is a hierarchy of sorts with the main group of enemies and this is as follows:

Brutes
Hunters
Jackals
Drones
Grunts

Brutes are the leaders of the enemies you will face on the battlefield and will actually give orders to the lower ranking enemies Grunts and Jackals, such as telling them to throw grenades or to chase you out of cover. If you take out a Brute leader, the lowly Grunts will panic and will become disorganised, many run away to hide and sneakily shoot you later, or some may even run towards you with a live grenade in each hand, when this happens, you will also panic. The Grunts are essentially fodder, but you will find yourself being the victim of over confidence when dealing with these enemies, as although they are not as skilled as many of the other enemies, their sheer numbers can make up for this shortcoming. When your shields are down, it only takes one hit from anything to kill you, and it most certainly will come from a sneaky Grunt.

Jackals are a bit more savvy than Grunts, and you will usually find them at other opposite end of the bullet that just came out of nowhere to kill you, they are the games snipers, but they can also be found on the battlefield with their round shields in arm, and they will often use these shields, Spartan style, to cover each other.

Drones are flying insect type enemies that attack in swarms. They don't take many hits to kill ,but hitting them proves quite difficult.

Hunters are less common in the game, but are huge enemies, around twice the size of your character and they always work in pairs. Each has a shield on one arm and a large gun that will do a lot of damage if it meets you. These enemies also know that their only weak spot is the only part of unarmoured flesh at their back and will make you work to get around there so you may introduce your bullets to their body. These guys work in pairs as they are partnered for life with their "blood brother" so you can imagine that they aren't too pleased if you take one of them down. Big enemies are bad, very angry big enemies are worse.

The enemies will also make use of their vehicles that range from small single passenger land based craft (Ghosts) to gut wrenchingly huge walking battle tanks (Scarabs).

Online Co-op
---------------------------
The online co-op is a new addition to the Halo series and allows you for the first time to team up with, not 1, not 2, but 3 other players over Xbox Live to tackle the campaign mode of the game.

This of course is a lot of fun and is a good way to complete the hardest "Legendary" difficulty setting, as 4 guns are better than 1! :)

Theres also a "scoring" option that can be switched on in the online co-op mode, where points are awarded for different types of enemy kills, with harder enemies worth more points and "headshots" are worth more than shooting an enemy several times in the chest. This also adds a somewhat competitive edge to the online co-op with players striving to get the best kills. This of course, is entirely optional.

I really like this feature as I am currently living very far away from my friends back home and it reunites us, reminding us of the days we played Halo and Halo 2 in splitscreen co-op. Apart from the real life dead arms I receive for the umpteenth friendly fire incident. Perfect.

Multiplayer
---------------------------
To put it simply, Halo 3 has the best multiplayer of any console game. Theres just so many different types of games you can play (with an infinite number you can create yourself, more on this in the next topic). Theres basically 3 main options for the multiplayer though. One is Ranked matchmaking, where its all about the points, and you are automatically matched to players of a similar skill to yours (the better you do, the more your skill increases of course). In this mode are a number of different game setups such as one vs one, two vs two, big team battles or objective based battles where you must capture the enemies' flag, working as part of a team for example. The online service randomly determines from a set list which map (level) and gametype you will play, and if you don't like what has been selected you can "veto" the selection once, with a majority vote to veto the selection the service will make another random selection of map and gametype.

The second type is Social Matchmaking, where its not about the scores, but rather the fun of the game. Here you may play people better or worse in skill than you, but its all just fun. This shares similar game setups as the ranked games without the stress of worrying about your score.

The third option is Custom Games, where you or a friend can create or select their own gametype and map and set options as they please, and invite you into it. Generally these types of games are for messing around, I will detail one such example in the next section.

The online system also makes use of a "Party" system, where you can create a party full of your friends that will stick you all together when it searches for games, so that way you can stay with your comrades when taking part in a team game, so you can put your teams newly developed tactics to the test. Think of it like a (Bungie's words) "Virtual Sofa", and this sofa contains you and your friends.

The multiplayer system is, as you've probably guessed by now, very sophisticated but its very easy to use, and most of these processes take place in the background and all you have to worry about is getting ready for your next match.

There's also a great deal of customisation that can be done to your own character, where progress through the game and progressing through the ranks in multiplayer (the more you play and the better you do, awards you different ranks which other people can see beside your name in multiplayer), allows you to unlock new armour permutations, so you can make your character look just as you want. You can of course change the colour of your character and create your own logo. Check out the screenshots attached to the review to get a look at my character!

Forge and Custom Games
------------------------------------------
Basically "Forge" is an object layout editor for the maps in the game. With this, you can choose a map to edit and fly around it in game choosing where you want to put items, powerups, weapons, vehicles and other objects. It sounds simple, but what you can do with it is nothing short of amazing. For a simple example, I wanted to create a big explosion, so I stacked lots of explosive boxes in one area with a "gravity lift" device underneath them to throw them up into the air, then BOOM! You have complete control over everything from how many of any item you want in the map, to how long it takes to "respawn", and the only real limit here is your imagination. Again, you can download others edited maps, known as "map variants" and play these on your console.

An interesting feature is that you can toggle from normal play mode to Forge mode with the simple press of a button. Meaning you can actually have a normal match, but with these little orbs flying around the level placing items and objects in the way of those playing. Dropping tanks on people is a particular favourite of mine. :) But think of this for a second. You can pretty much change Halo 3 into a realtime strategy game in this way. You may choose to have 1 person in each time as a Forge editor, placing handy items, weapons or vehicles for you as you battle the opposing team. Again, possibilities unlimited!

To give you an example of the flexibility of this system, we had a game the other night that we called "Vampires". We took the existing in the box gametype "Infection", where one person is infected and most chase after the other players, the ones he kills then become infected and most help him catch the others etc, and made changes to it. Basically we made the infected people 3x faster, and they could jump 3x higher than the normal players. We also took away the infected's ability to pick up weapons or ride vehicles and gave them one single weapon, the "Plasma Sword", which meant they had to get up close to make their kills or rather "to infect" their prey.

We played this gametype on a large map called "Sandtrap" to which we added some motorbike vehicles, known as the Mongoose (whats the plural, Mongeese?). The result was unadulterated hilarity. Each non infected player would scramble for the, cleverly limited in a musical chairs kind of way, Mongoose vehicles as a means to avoid the super fast "Vampires" as they ran after the vehicle "T1000 in Terminator 2" style. Each Mongoose can hold one passenger on back, who can turn around and fire weapons at the pursuing enemy. The amount of (as my girlfriend put it) "screaming like girls" we did when one of us fell off the Mongoose and the super fast enemy was getting close, was hilarious, and in retrospect, slightly embarrassing :)

But this was some of the most fun I had on a multiplayer game ever, forget scores and statistics, we took Bungie's playground and made our own games, and played them for fun, and everyone can do exactly the same. Check the attached screenshots of this match (made using the in game Saved Films feature).

This is just one example of literally millions of combinations of gametypes and level setups. People will be playing this game online for years to come. The great thing is that if you like your newly created gametype, you can upload it and someone else can choose to download the gametype to their console and vice-versa, Bungie allows you to share anything you create with others, and if enough people like it, Bungie may even add it to their "Bungie Favourites" and promote the gametype or map variant you created. There are too many things to list here so its easier if I just say that EVERYTHING in the game can be altered, from gravity and speed, to the effect of powerups or objectives that can be set for the teams. Basically everything the game developer could do to create new types of games, you can do, expect for making changes to the actual terrain in the maps. Already people have created using a combination of Forge and Custom Games, new types of games including racing on vehicles to hide and seek.

The only drawback of all these extras is I suppose they may all be very overwhelming for a lot of people, but the good thing is that these tools are only there for those who want to make use of them. If you don't want to bother with any of this tinkering then you are made very welcome to go ahead and play in the games standard matchmaking, or at home with friends on splitscreen or with a few Xbox 360s linked up (with a few beers and snacks this is well recommended, if you can handle the dead arms from over zealous mates).

Saved Films
---------------------------
In short, the Saved Films feature is a miracle. I have no idea how they do it, but everything you do in the single player or multiplayer is recorded and you can watch it back in "The Theatre" option. Now thats not all, you can of course watch your film from the same perspective, or, you can have a look in third person view of what you did, or you can even detach the camera from your player and zoom around the level whilst you watch what you did. You can zoom out to see how you took on those big enemies, or even scout ahead to see what the enemies were doing before they engaged you. You can also pause the game at any second and still zoom around the level looking at explosions that are in the middle of exploding from any angle. You can then take a screenshot of anything you want and save it to your Xbox or upload it Bungie.net for others to download and rate. Its simply staggering.

The saved films are not actually compressed movies but rather code telling the game engine what exactly happened, so even a 1 hour film will only be like 3 MB! The game keeps the most 30 recent videos on your Xbox, or you can permanently save your favourites, you will of course need to have Halo 3 to watch the films.

Imagine being beaten all the time in multiplayer and you don't know why, now you can go into any previous game you played and analyse the other players skills (you can even look at the entire game from their perspective, if you want!), so you can learn from the best. You can even download others' films onto your Xbox, even if you weren't in that game. The possibilities here are limitless!

Also its worth noting here that all the screenshots I have attached to this review have been made using the Saved Film's screenshot feature :)

Bungie.net
---------------------------
Bungie.net serves as a point of contact for the community of Halo 3. It contains every type of game, every screenshot, every film and every forge map variant that people have created and chose to upload. If you are proud of a particular film or game you made, then you can upload it onto your "File share" which consists of 6 slots and a limit of 25MB. Once something is on your file share, its is available to others to download and rate.

Bungie.net also serves as a way to track all your statistics from everything you have done in the single player or multiplayer games. Its literally an exhaustive amount of information they have there! To give you an example of the vast amount of information and features available on Bungie.net for this game, you can check out my statistics here:

*****MAY HAVE POTENTIAL SPOILERS SO BE CAREFUL!*******

http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Halo3/Default.aspx?player=He eeres+Pete

**EDIT: try this link instead**: http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Halo3/Default.aspx?player=Heeeres+Pete

Are you back? Good! what did you think? There is lots of information there yes? You may also have noticed that you can take screenshots of your game and upload them. Thats a pretty cool feature, and well, thats not all...

The game tracks **every single thing** that every single player connected to Xbox Live has done, in the single player and multiplayer. You can have a look at which weapon you are most proficient with, what your favourite levels are, how many kills/deaths you had, and tracks certain actions that you do and awards you badges for these. These certain actions include things such as sticking enemies with 5 grenades in a level, beating people with only a melee attack or getting a run of kills without dying. There are dozens of these types of badges, which many will like to collect all of! The statistics add a very strategic aspect to the game, you can find out for example, what you need to improve on, or which maps you need to go back and be more familiar with. If you couple this with the fact that every single match you play is recorded and added to your console (to which you can save your favourites permanently), and watch them to observe skills and tactics from other players (you can of course, pause the game, follow other players or even detach the camera and zoom around the map at your leisure while you review the match you just played), you can see that its a really immense feature and really must be seen to be believed. (If you haven't done so already, I urge you to check out the link above to get an idea of the level of detail here).

**Overall**

Graphics
---------------------------
Despite the game looking very very nice, some have expressed disappointment with the game's graphics, given Bungie's stellar work on Halo and Halo 2 on the original Xbox, but I think Bungie have made a brave decision with the games graphics in that they have opted for providing a more flexible and stable gaming experience over jaw dropping graphics. Of course, the fact that many find these graphics not entirely jaw dropping brings me back to my earlier point of "insane expectations", as these graphics are everything you would expect from a next-gen console, but at first glance don't really compare to graphics from, for example, last years Gears of War. BUT, and this is a big but (which is why I wrote it in capitals), no other game comes close to Halo 3s sense of scale and epicness (a new word I invented). The graphics engine throws around dozens of the previously mentioned smart enemies with vehicles, turrets and grenades etc and huge battles taking place in the sky over your heard, without any hint of slowdown.

Explosions and gunfire are constantly going off, causing sometimes chain reactions of other explosions with vehicles and objects and enemies tumbling around the game. The sense that you are in an actual battlefield has never been so real in a game like this before. And I haven't even mentioned some of the gigantic enemies you will face, all with their own Artificial Intelligence, as opposed to scripted events like those seen in most games.

The textures are very detailed and the lighting is some of the best you will ever see in a game, and there is an insane attention to detail to the little things with this game, which seems strange given the size of the levels! The major reason for complain is that the game doesn't use any Anti Aliasing (The process of smoothing out jagged edges on everything in the game), so the game has a lots of jagged edges on objects as opposed to smooth edges on most games. But really, most people wouldn't even notice this, and even though I'm a bit of nitpicker its not really that bad at all, once again considering everything that is going on!

The best way I could sum this up would be to say that it may not be the best looker (even though its still very pretty) but by God it has personality because of it.

Sound
---------------------------
Marty O' Donnell, the games lead sound editor, has done a fantastic job with this game. The music is the usual Halo fare, very haunting and almost operatic on one side, and upbeat, modern and epic on the other. The music fits the game perfectly also, as it will really speed up the tempo and become very epic when you are about to dash into a huge battle. The music really makes the game complete and at times will actually give you goosebumps.

The sound effects are also top notch, especially in surround sound! The gunfire in particular is very impressive and clear, and the team have done a great job with the sound effects of gunfire in the distance, it sounds very very real.

The voice acting is also superb and the game features thousands of lines of dialogue from your enemies and team mates as you play. Some of them are actually quite funny, such as Grunts screaming "Legs don't fail me now", and unlike in most games, these little pieces of dialogue rarely repeat, meaning by the end of the game you are still hearing new things.

Longevity
---------------------------
After going through each of the features above, its easy to see that this game has months, if not years of playing in it. If you get bored of a certain game, you can just make your own! The single player may not last as long as many would have hoped, but theres dozens of reasons, including improving your score or striving to unlock every Xbox Achievement or collect every Skull (hidden in each level, finding them allows you to toggle new features in the single player when you play through again), that will bring you back to this game again and again.

Top marks here!

Conclusion
---------------------------
The main problem with Halo 3 is that for those that do not have access to a broadband connection and will be playing the Single player campaign only they will miss out on all these features. Of course, the saved films can still be watched from games played splitscreen on the console, and the gametypes and forge can still be used for your own local splitscreen games but the extra statistics and ability to download others screenshots, films, gametypes and map variants won't be available to those without Xbox Live.

Still, the single player is worthy on its own of a purchase, but the package obviously won't feel as complete unless you have the internet setup and Xbox Live, but I suppose the same criticism can be levelled at most games these days anyway.

So, definitely highly recommended by me, and as I've said before, the amount of hype for this game has been nothing short of extraordinary and the fact that it comes so close to this astronomical hype is testament to the games quality and immense range of features. I hope if you do choose to get this game, that we can meet online sometime in the years to come, I'll be the guy cowering in the corner getting shot at regularly, no doubt.

**A word of advice though, try to avoid buying the Collectors Edition as there have been reports of the discs falling out of the casing and becoming scratched, due to the game cases being a bit, well, dodgy. This also happened to mine and pretty much everyone I have talked to with the same edition. Luckily, my game works perfectly fine, but Microsoft have said that they will replace these scratched discs for free up until the end of the year, but still, if you can, avoid it as its not really worth the extra cost anyway: the metal box feels very cheap and flimsy (mines was also dented lots) and you will find the "making of" videos and extras on the internet someday anyway.**

**Again check out profile on Bungie.net to get a better idea: **
http://www.bungie.net/Stats/Halo3/Default.aspx?player=Heeeres+Pete 

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