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Halo 3

Reviewed on: Xbox 360
Available on: Xbox 360

A somewhat large portion of this review is going to seem nitpicky. It is, because the largest problem I have with Halo 3 is how little it has improved, and how little Bungie has learnt in the many years working on the Halo series.

Players: 1 - 16 Players (xbox live)
Genre:
Release: 2007-09-25

Developer: Bungie
Distributor: Microsoft

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A somewhat large portion of this review is going to seem nitpicky. It is, because the largest problem I have with Halo 3 is how little it has improved, and how little Bungie has learnt in the many years working on the Halo series.

But don't get me wrong. I'm not here to criticise Halo 3 for lacking originality while claiming that the original Halo was good. It wasn't. I didn't have the opportunity to write about it back then, but now I do. I bought Halo 3 in the hopes that something might have changed for the better. Well, there's more beautifully painted backdrops and large scale space-age buildings than you can poke a stick at, but that's just garnish. Where's the beef?

The answer is - there isn't any. I have always held Halo in high regard due to its excellent atmosphere and setting. The aforementioned beautiful backdrops are stunning every time, and Bungie seems to have cottoned on to the idea that after mesmerising audiences with big open landscapes filled with epic structures and giant lights, people will open their wallets and let you have their way with them. That's all well and good, but I tend to put a little more weight into the gameplay, which Halo 3 sorely lacks.

The hero of space, Master Chief, has somehow survived this far through the war against the Covenant and highly boring Flood. A group of anonymous grunt soldiers find him unconscious in a ditch surrounded by a lush rainforest. The first level seems to be a clear attempt at saying "The graphics aren't that great, but if we impress people right away with lots of leaves and water, no one will notice". Still, it looks OK, and as a general rule, I'll never condemn a game based on graphics alone. It still looks good, but not as good as it could have. Whatever, moving along. Time to blast through this forest with vigour and gusto.

Alas! Here I find myself battling those same annoying little munchkin baddies that yell things in perfect English and waddle around scared. I burst out laughing when one of them called me a "jerk". I'll never be able to continue fighting if they keep throwing vicious put-downs like that at me. I don't feel like killing them, I want to stuff one full of love-fluff and give it to my sister as a present. Wow, what a big bad deadly space combat game this is. I feel like a real hero.

I would say the weapons are good, but that would be a lie. You're still stuck with the same old assault rifle and pistol, and the alien weapons are so rooted in design stereotypes I feel like I'm playing with NERF foam pistols. The aliens love painting their weapons bright pinks, greens and blues, while each fires an assortment of equally bright-coloured and pitifully intimidating balls of pink and green. The only brutal attack available is the woefully overpowered melee whomp. Never mind that I've been headshotting this chump with my rifle, he'll go down with a bop on the noggin from the butt of a foam gun. The weapon tomfoolery doesn't even stop there.

Take duel-wielding for example. If Master Chief is holding his Magnum in one hand and some strangely dull alien weapon in the other, he will lose control of the second weapon and drop it on the floor if he wants to melee attack someone with the first. When I'm eating, I always drop my knife when I pick up something with my fork. When driving, I always lose control of the wheel when I go to change gears. I can't do something with one hand without losing control of the other at the same time. Oh, except I can reload a pistol I'm holding in one hand while shooting simultaneously with the other. Hey, so can Master Chief! He can deftly execute a complex reloading technique with one hand and still engage in combat, yet can't manage a dim-witted swing of his arm through the air without dropping his other gun like a fucking idiot. Lame.

If you are zoomed in with a sniper rifle, every time you get hit Master Chief will freak out like an idiot and revert back to a normal view. Never mind the fact that he has titanium, gel-based quantum-leap billion dollar ultra space-awesome armour, a scratch will make him have a little cry and lose focus on what he was engineered to do - kill things. The enemies have no problem standing rigid as you rain bullets on their bodies, thanks to the completely nonreactive animations that makes enemy fire seem like a subtle gust of wind. Occasionally (read: that's all they do) the big guys will perform outstanding tactical movements, like TAKE ONE GIANT SIDESTEP LEFT, or TAKE ONE GIANT SIDESTEP RIGHT. How can I possibly pinpoint these baddies amongst amazing evasive skills such as like these there? At one point early on, you'll be forced to make your way uphill through a room where at least ten giant bad guys will be blocking your way, and it looks a little like a shooting gallery as they all stand next to each other, side-stepping back and forth in a vain attempt to stay alive.

One more thing. A turret is a turret. If you wanted to give players a giant gun, then give them a giant gun. Don't let them "detach turret", disguise it as some new gameplay innovation, and mask it behind a lame, sluggish third-person viewpoint. Is this an FPS or TPS? Make up your mind.

Take command of whichever unoriginal or uninspired weapon, and hit the killing floor. It helps that the monotony of level design has improved over the first two games, but this benefit only arrives in the form of a shorter game. Halo 3 consists of spectacular scripted action sequences involving vehicle combat and scarab tanks, but the rest falls back into corridor-shooting crappiness. Several levels force you to make your way back through the corridors you just cleared, and considering the campaign is so short, this exponentially increases the boredom factor. Add the level which forces you to wade through what look like the inside of someone's anus for about an hour, and the final sequence....hang on. What?

It's the SAME ENDING. Drive a Warthog at high speeds through dangerous terrain and narrowly escape death. I wouldn't have minded so much if they didn't USE THE EXACT SAME CORRIDORS as the first game! This is the point where I feel at a loss for words. They are...releasing the same game they released years ago. They use the same enemies, the same guns, the same level styles (stock standard beach battle/sterile corridor/snow/vehicle convoy levels, the same as the first game? Check), barely updated graphics and outdated cinematics. How is everyone praising this game? How can critics bring themselves to tout Halo 3 as a "must-buy"? I have not read one single negative review about Halo 3. Has the entire world gone mad? Not entirely. There is one little additional feature called...multiplayer.

Halo 2 was only surpassed by Gears of War in Xbox Live multiplayer popularity, and now Halo 3 is back to steal the crown. The good news is that multiplayer is solid enough to enjoy, regardless of the single-player monotony. It seems the somewhat drab engine wasn't done any favours by poor level design and enemies in the campaign, but throw some human players into the mix and the game really heats up. I can't give Bungie too much credit here, though - it plays pretty much identically to Halo 2, and they haven't done much of anything to enrich the experience.

The rather simple Matchmaking feature allows you to jump straight in with other players roughly around your skill level. All your combat history is viewable in your Service Record, and this also keeps track of experience points and online ranking. It's a decent enough incentive to keep playing, but there's no additional upgrade system in the same vein as Perks and weapon abilities featured in COD4. There's a whole bunch of big maps, small maps, team modes, objective modes - all made slightly more unbearable by the annoying chatter of moronic teammates perpetually pumping through one's speakers. Muting solves the problem all well and good, but if you want a consistent team ready to work together and enjoy multiplayer to its fullest, you'll be searching for a while. Forge mode is simple, yes - manipulate the locations of environmental objects. Some may claim there's heaps of fun to be had here, but after ten minutes I realised there's limited depth in piling up explosive tanks and watching each other fly through the air. Yay.

So what have Bungie really done with Halo 3? They grabbed the same combat engine used in two previous games and failed spectacularly to combine it wth a compelling single-player campaign. They also took the same engine and used it for a multiplayer component, which plays the same as its predecessor. So that's one fail, one pass - but points off considering it's a pass they've already used in Halo 2, and it's the skill of the players that make it fun, not Bungie's mediocre level design. There's two more points to consider.

1. We were playing with far deeper multiplayer customisation way back on the Nintendo 64 with Perfect Dark.

2. While fun, there's better and more original multiplayer games out there. I had more fun playing the COD4 multiplayer beta, and that didn't cost me any money at all - cough, Crackdown.

Well, it's time to wrap this up. On the whole, I enjoyed Halo 3 for a few hours during the more intense moments of the campaign, and the most hectic multiplayer matches. The majority of time, however, was spent wondering just how the single biggest game in history has achieved such a status. There's plenty of worse games to avoid than Halo 3, and indeed the Halo series as a whole, but I for one won't be buying any Halo product ever again. It's probably a good thing that the trilogy has wrapped up; Bungie can get all their little Halo cash-in side projects out of the way and focus on something far more worthwhile than milking the adventures of a tired old man in a funny green space suit. Someone will inevitably raise the idea that New Halo Game + ? = Profit, but I don't know if the industry will tolerate (or, at least avoid gushing praise) the same game for a fourth time. I sure hope not.

I have only the scores of other reviews and the rabid praise of Halo fans to compare with. It's not much of an indication, but I'm going to give Halo 3 a score. I'll score Halo 3 in a way I think best reflects my opinion against the rest of the industry. Halo 3 gets 6/10. Somewhat fun, not great. That about covers it.

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Final Verdict

I wish I could avoid being labelled as a fanboy Halo-Hater after this review, but it's pretty much unavoidable. I also wish this review would affect sales in the slightest, which it won't. It's a shame, but I know there's still a select few who share my opinion. Well done! You get an A!

Pros
Epic battles are good fun, level design not quite as monotonous as earlier Halo games. Multiplayer is shallow but good for a lark. Trilogy is over now.
Cons
Reused weapons, reused levels, reused enemies, reused graphics, reused music. It's a shame this stuff wasn't any good to begin with.