Halo 3 – An Indepth Review

Halo 3 is still mainly about the multiplayer

Halo 3 really needs no introduction. By now, every gamer has heard of the series. Why should I even bother writing a review for this game? Its massive scope (the game outsold the PS3 already) and marketing make its hype very hard to deny. However, some of you may enjoy reading my review of this game, as a guy that did not enjoy Halo 1 or Halo 2, and never really cared much for multiplayer modes of 360 games. Halo 3 was good enough to get me to not only enjoy Halo 3, but to want to play more multiplayer gaming as well.

Intro
For those that don’t know much about the Halo series, it is the most important title that Microsoft Game Studios owns. The developers behind the game, Bungie, were originally a Mac game developer famous for Marathon (I remember playing this in my high school computer lab) and Myth. Bungie originally announced Halo 1 for Mac and PC in the 1999 MacWorld Expo, but the studio was acquired by Microsoft shortly after. Halo 1 was then turned into an Xbox only release, receiving several Game of the Year awards in 2002 and becoming the Xbox’s only real must-have game. Without Halo, many people believed that the Xbox would have flopped. Halo went on to sell 5 million copies worldwide, and its sequel, Halo 2, has since sold 8 million copies worldwide (Halo 2 is the top selling Xbox game ever).

With the numbers Halo 1 and 2 brought in for Microsoft, the company decided to spend a ton of money as well marketing Halo 3. Some question why the marketing was even necessary, but many fans engaged in the hype for the third game anyway. I myself got caught up in it, and went to the NYC midnight release of the game myself.

The Halo 3 NYC midnight launch at Best Buy in Midtown Manhattan

Halo 3 was released one month ago, and has already sold more than 5 million copies worldwide. Halo 3 has outsold Halo 1 in just one month, and many Xbox 360 fans are laughing at Sony because Halo 3 has outsold the PS3 unit itself. The Halo 3 launch wasn’t without incident, however. The game was launched in three different formats: Standard, Collector’s, and Legendary. The Legendary edition came with a mini Spartan helmet (perfect for cat size) and everything in the Collector’s edition, and the Collector’s edition contained some extra content on disc. Unfortunately for the Collector’s edition buyers, the casing for the game was poorly made so many of the discs in the Collector’s edition got dislodged during shipping and were scratched. Microsoft has admitted to the problem and agreed to replace the discs, but having to wait a month to play the game after sending it to Microsoft irked some fans.

Hunters are among the toughest enemies you have to fight in the campaign

Storyline and Premise of the Game
Having not really gotten into (or beaten) either of the first two Halo games, I can’t say I understand too much of the storyline. From what I played in the first game and the cut scenes of Halo 3, I was able to piece together that the game centers on Master Chief, a super soldier who was “created” to help humans in an “intergalactic war.” There are three other races present in the game: the Elites, the Covenant, and the Flood. The Elite is another alien race that has allied with the humans in this war, while the Covenant is the primary alien villain in the game that is trying to destroy Earth. The Flood is a parasitic alien life form that is a secondary alien villain in that they want to kill both humans and Covenant alike so there is sort of a three-way war going on. In Halo 3, Master Chief and the Arbiter (an Elite) are tasked with fighting these aliens and preventing the destruction of Earth. (That’s my storyline summary for someone who never really got into the storyline of the series.)

Halo 3 is broken up into 9 campaign levels. Each level tends to take place in a different locale from the next, allowing for more variety in the game such as deserts, jungles, and snow. I found the 9 campaign levels to be far too short as it is beatable on Normal difficulty in about 5 hours. I believe the perfect campaign length for games of this type is about 15-20 hours – games such as Ninja Gaiden, Resident Evil 4, BioShock, and Rainbow Six: Vegas all are closer to 20 hour games on Normal difficulty.

To give the campaign more replayability, Bungie allowed for 4 player co-op through the storyline. The problem with this issue is that the difficulty does not scale appropriately for 4 players. The highest difficulty possible for the campaign mode is Legendary. While nearly impossible in single player, it is quite feasible for two players to go through the campaign on Legendary so the addition of a 3rd or 4th player even somewhat trivializes the difficulty. However, a meta game was added to the campaign mode in terms of an earnable score for each campaign level. Headshots, sticky bomb kills, higher difficulties, etc. result in a higher score possible for a campaign level and can be turned on during a co-op run for bragging rights.

The Spartan laser is a very powerful weapon. Although it requires 5 seconds to charge, it can destroy vehicles as well as multiple opponents in one blast

Game Mechanics
The mechanics of Halo 3 have not differed much from the previous iterations of the game at all. The weapon system in Halo 3 relies on a mixture of human and Covenant weapons as well as grenades. Players can dual-wield weapons at the cost of being able to use grenades. The control for the weapons is quite intuitive – right trigger is the trigger for the right gun, right button is reload on that gun, and the left trigger is for the left gun or grenade. The left button reloads the left gun, or if grenades are being used, it will switch the grenade type.

The combo of a gravity hammer and a bubble shield can deter enemies with ranged firearms from picking you off

Not only can you melee with any weapon you’re carrying in the game, but melee weapons themselves are available too. The plasma sword makes its return, allowing you to quickly one hit kill pretty much anything, and the gravity hammer is a new weapon introduced in Halo 3. One swing of this weapon at point blank and it’s an instant kill while at the same time it has an area of effect ring that not only damages those around the point of impact, but it launches them into the air.

Two-handed non-melee weapons are also new in Halo 3. Throughout the campaign (and in multiplayer matches) one can come across chain guns, plasma cannons, rocket launchers, and flame throwers. When using these weapons, the player will move a lot slower than normal and the view will switch to third person.

A new gameplay element was added in Halo 3 that the previous iterations didn’t have: items. One can only carry one item at a time, but many of them are quite useful such as portable shields, cloaking, healing, mines, etc. They don’t change the balance of the game too much, but they do make it a bit more strategic since another element to the game has been added.

The vehicles still play a major role in both campaign and multiplayer.

Game mechanics that remain unchanged from previous iterations include the life bar and vehicles. For those that didn’t know, Halo was the original game that pioneered the “life refill when not taking damage” bar that is prevalent (and expected) in many 360 games today. Halo 3 still has the shield and life bar. Vehicles also remain in the game, and are still a large part of the game. Throughout the game one can drive/fly various human and Covenant contraptions.

The tried and true CTF mod returns as a Halo 3 Team Objective gametype

Multiplayer
The reason why so many people love the Halo games is not due to its storyline or campaign mode, but its online mode. I believe that most people buy Halo for its multiplayer only – and for good reason: it contains the most polished multiplayer system I’ve ever seen, including Blizzard’s battle.net. With its wealth of stat tracking as well as party-up modes, I got into the multiplayer. I played it and enjoyed it so much that it’s made me realize that multiplayer gaming can still be pretty fun.

Halo 3’s multiplayer finds other opponents automatically for you

What’s so good about Halo 3’s multiplayer?

1. Match-making
Halo 3 has built in match-making for multiplayer games. You just pick a game type you wish to play and bungie.net will search for other players of similar skill level and put you all into the same game. Most other games have a lobby system where someone just creates a game and waits in the room for others to join it. While some get lucky and their rooms fill up quickly, many hosts sit and wait for much longer than the ease of use and speed that matchmaking provides. Some complain that with matchmaking they cannot choose custom settings for their games. While a legitimate concern for those that want to play the same map over and over, I’m fine with giving that up to be able to play online this easily. I like the variety in maps as well.

2. Rank
Halo 3 allows for unranked and ranked games, similar to battle.net’s ladder and non-ladder games. Halo 3 gives you a rank for each game mode you play, whether it’s just deathmatch, team deathmatch, team objective, etc. By winning games your rank goes up, and of course it can go down as well if you lose games. The actual calculation behind the rank number is a mystery at this point as you can actually rank up after losing a game by doing very well in a ranked game against a team with much better players. Regardless, rank allows for players to play with others of a similar level, and at the same time gives those that want to compete a reason to do so.

3. Party feature
Halo 3 allows you to form a party with any of your friends (or even people you just played with) and look for a game together in both ranked and unranked games. In the past when my friends and and I used to play Rainbow Six: Vegas, it was very difficult to get us all in the same game because there are no voice chat rooms on Live, making it very hard to get us all to join a game before it fills (let alone get on the same team). The party feature is probably the most important multiplayer feature I like about Halo 3 because it allows me to pretty much always play on the same team as my friends without ever having to worry.

Halo 3’s Theater mode allows players to join a saved movie of the game and watch it together.

4. Theatre Mode
Another new addition to Halo 3 is the saving of films. Halo 3 automatically saves the last 30-40 games you played. You can load any of these videos and record parts of it or take pictures and share with your friends. You can even invite your friends and watch any saved videos together, letting you discuss strategy and/or tactics about certain players or maps.

You can check which medals you earned in your previous game when waiting for your next game to get started

5. Stat tracking
The stat tracking in Halo 3 is intense. It’s not just as simple as how many kills and how many deaths you have, but every type of kill you’ve gotten. There’s little medals awarded to you after each game based on what you did, whether it’s a killing spree (5 people killed before you were killed), kill from the grave (killed someone with a grenade after they had already killed you), sniper head shot, etc. All of these get tracked and by checking your profile at bungie.net, you can see the total number of medals you’ve earned in all the games you played as well how you do on each map type as well as what weapons you are most proficient with (or weak against).

The multiplayer map Guardian was influenced by the Ewok huts from Return of the Jedi

Achievement System
I’m not completely satisfied with the Achievement system in Halo 3. While I think it’s good that 900 of the 1000 Achievement points can simply be earned from playing the campaign only, I am disappointed that several more “notable” Achievements were not included. First of all, there’s no distinction in terms of Achievements for beating the game on Legendary solo or co-op. By beating the game on co-op, one unlocks the Achievement but it would have been nicer to see a separate Achievement for beating the game on Legendary alone. That’s definitely something to be proud of and it would have kept me playing the single player for many more hours. I also felt that the meta game score Achievements for each level were a little too low. They were not very difficult to get and could have been raised higher.

While I am understanding of developers deciding to have multiplayer-only Achievements in their games, I’m not a fan because many of them are boostable and that makes them pointless to earn in the first place. Bungie decided to implement multiplayer Achievements anyway, and fumbled on two fronts. The first issue is that almost all of the multiplayer Achievements are for ranked FFA play only. With the attention to detail they put in for the tough ranked FFA Achievements, they should have added in corresponding Achievements to the various other modes as well, encouraging people to play all of the modes to be able to show off. The second issue with their Achievements is that people discovered a way around earning the ranked FFA achievements legitimately, making them worthless. An Achievement such as getting 10 kills in a row without dying in a ranked FFA is mighty impressive, but with its legitimacy thrown out it’s meaningless.

Mounted turrets can be used with infinite ammo or broken off and carried around with limited ammo

Final Thoughts
Halo 3 was the first Halo game that I was able to actually beat (a few times actually). That says a lot considering I fell asleep several times in the Halo 1 campaign and I never even bothered to play the Halo 2 campaign. The single player is quite short though and the Achievements weren’t the best they could be. The presentation was mostly good – the sound and music was excellent but the graphics were not as good as I had hoped. It looks basically like Halo 1 and 2 for the original Xbox – where are the next gen graphics? I guess the graphics were kept minimal to allow for split-screen online play, which I’m sure several players would argue is a fair tradeoff. If the game were just single player only, I’d probably give it a score of C+ or B-, but its multiplayer pulls it through to get a final grade of an A-.

A campaign two or three times longer as well as better Achievements and nicer graphics would have made this game the frontrunner for Game of the Year in my opinion. Its single player is nowhere near as good (or satisfying) as BioShock, but its multiplayer had me hooked. I played the multiplayer and ranked up to the point where I knew I reached my peak, and I was done (it just got too frustrating after that). If people were to ask me if they should get this game, I would say that it depends on whether you have Live or not. With Live, it’s a definitely buy but without it, I’d say skip it.