(X360) Halo 3 - review
September 26, 2007 – 4:58 am
Bungie concludes its trilogy with a bang. So there is only one thing that u can do now!Get into your tight Mjolnir armour and make ready for war!You have to be more mentally challenged than the average bloke to deny the important role the Halo franchise has played for Microsoft and its Xbox consoles. As one of the most played online games ever on Xbox Live, Halo 2 marked the enormous online potential in an eventual new chapter – a chapter that is being realised all over the world on September 26th, where Xbox 360 owners can experience the final chapter in the series and finally finish the fight.
We were invited to Microsoft’s Danish headquarters to review the game, an offer we naturally couldn’t refuse.
Finish the Fight
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I’m sitting with an ordinary piece of paper in front of me. On it is written all the things I’m not allowed to write about concerning the single player portion of the game. They could just as well have smacked a post-it with the word “EVERYTHING” on my head when I entered the room, because there really isn’t much left to talk about. So I’m going to skip that part completely. If you are interested in Halo 3’s plot, you probably know all about the outline already, and you can probably imagine everything that is going to happen in the third chapter.
Halo 3’s single player is… Halo. Halo, with all that is. It tells the story as it
should and concludes it for the fans that have followed the two previous games. Gone are the monotonous environments – you can feel that Bungie has worked on making the levels appear not too similar. It hasn’t really succeeded, as there is a quite a bit of backtracking through the levels. It feels like Bungie has folded some of the levels to double their size. Some might feel its ok to use the levels like that, but I found it a bit trivial to run back and forth to look for a door with a green light on indicating it’s open.
In total it took us a little under six hours to complete Halo 3 on the normal difficulty setting with two people behind the screen (supports up to four!), but we didn’t spend much time enjoying the landscape. You can certainly argue that the game is a tad short, but focus should rather be on the game’s history and the fantastic multiplayer part.
Multifight
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And multiplayer is where Halo 3 really shines. Bungie has certainly listened to its community and further developed on the online success that Halo 2 was. There are a total of nine multiplayer modes in the game, each of them offering a handful of pre-defined options – like sub-versions of each mode. As if that wasn’t enough, you can actually adjust the modes individually, creating your own multiplayer mode.
The possibilities are almost endless, so there will be amble opportunity to for example build you own variation of the VIP-theme, where one player is the VIP and only capable of being the passenger in the Mongoose – and the only available weapon is of course the rocket launcher. It offers a whole new variation of the theme, and that’s just one of many options.
A ton of hours awaits in Halo 3’s multiplayer game – it’s actually such an essential part of the game that there really isn’t any reason to get it if you don’t plan on playing online – unless of course if you’re just crazy about the story of Master Chief.
Forge
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Forge is Halo 3’s big sandbox. Forge takes place much like multiplayer on one of the game’s many levels. Here you can change between your character and a so-called “Forerunner Monitor”, a flying robot. As Monitor you can place things on the level, such as weapons, cars, plasma batteries and barrels, and even move them in real-time while people are playing on the level.
When you have made the changes you like, you can save the level and load it in a normal game of multiplayer. It makes it possible to change the levels as you see fit – hide powerups and the good weapons on hard to reach places or block the gates to the fort and let the teams spawn on each side of the walls. Combined with the many options in the multiplayer part, it is indeed possible to create your own unique multiplayer mode that you can share with others.
Theater
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Another of the big new features is that the game saves everything you do as a little movie on the machine’s hard drive. The pc-community have in many years benefited from programs such as Fraps, responsible for capturing some of the most humiliating head-shots in games like Counter-Strike. Now it’s the Halo players’ turn, and the feature is in many ways smarter than Fraps.
It saves everything you play in raw game data, which means it takes up very little space. Consequently it requires you to have the game to play the clips. That the data is saved like this also makes it possible to see the action from any angle and in any area of the level. You get centre-row seats to the best action in the entire movie. There are limitations on how many sequences are saved, but it works in both singleplayer, multiplayer and Co-Op.
An option to run it in step-less slow-motion is lacking, as replay is a bit dodgy, as is an option to jump in the recorded material, making it more time consuming to find the best parts than it has to be. I hope this will be changed in a future update, as it has tremendous potential. You can send your movies to other players and cut them so that only the moments parts are saved.
It really is Halo
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The only disappointing thing I can point at in Halo 3, if I really have to criticise – and you know, that’s 50 percent of any review – is that the graphics aren’t top notch. Naturally, the game is highly detailed, and the transition to the current console generation has certainly been successful. But you can’t help but notice the amount of aliasing, and it really doesn’t suit Halo 3 in any way.
On the other hand there are many places with some spectacular landscapes, where you can stand and look at an entire planet. At those places you forget about the jagged edges as you struggle to keep your jaw attached to the rest of your face. In Theatre, where you can freeze the picture completely and study the environments more closely, you can see how much attention have been paid to detail – it’s astonishing. The sound effects are as good as in the previous games, and the soundtrack by Marty O’Donnell is still eminent. A lot of dialogue has been recorded for the game, which only makes the experience that much better.
I have decided to give Halo 3 a 9, and I feel that you can put together good and valid arguments for both a higher and lower score. If you are a fan of the series you can easily raise the score to 10, as this is as good as it gets. Halo 3 has it all. An ending in the well polished single player part, and when that’s completed countless hours of multiplayer action lies ahead. It’s not by accident that Halo 2 holds the record for the most played game on Xbox Live, and it’s only a matter of time before Halo 3 takes over. It’s bigger, better looking and in every way cooler than the previous games, and that’s saying a lot talking about Halo. Get off the hype-wagon and try it yourself.
Believe.
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