Mission Improbable: The Halo 3 Review

We're now able to talk about it openly, so enough with the small talk, let's start the review.

Wednesday, Sept. 19, 2007. That’s when I got the call.

When I heard kind of last minute that I would be reviewing the game that many of us have been waiting years to play, I kind of freaked out.

My first thoughts were s**t do I have time this weekend, and then I threw that out the window and said, “What the hell this is the chance of the lifetime. I’ll make time.”

I went through my mental checklist of things to do for the weekend: review two movies, work the Oklahoma State vs. Texas Tech football game, take my mom to lunch for her birthday and do Sunday evening bowling league.

Have the opportunity to play Halo 3 early for the price of an impossible review? Sleep? What is this sleep you speak of?

As it would turn out, I’d have two days to play through the campaign, explore saved films, check out the multiplayer maps and play around in forge. Any one of these things could be a stand-alone review in and of itself. There’s so much to talk about, I hardly know where to begin.

At the beginning, I suppose.

Load Up

Halo 3 fires up with a loading screen not unlike that of the beta – landscapes of blue and the exact same music. The entry page gives you an innocuous menu of choices: Campaign, Custom Games, Matchmaking, Forge, Theater. Just pick one. You’ll be able to get to any of them later without going back out to the main menu. None of this requires great explanation, and you don’t need to RTFM.

Pick your poison and go.
For the sake of the review: Campaign.

With the release of Bioshock last month, single player talk is all the rage, especially with many calling it one of the best single-player games ever.

Halo 3 isn’t Bioshock. It doesn’t have plasmids or a way for you to invent new items. You don’t get to decide whether or not you’re going to play it good and save the little sisters or harvest them. You’re not trying to figure out who you can trust.

In Halo 3, you’re going to war. In a very real sense, Bioshock and Halo 3 are different genres. Sure, they’re both shooters, both FPS, which technically makes it seem as though they’re the same, but … no.

Which you like better may come down to a matter of preference, but make no mistake, Halo 3 is a damn good game. It’s all the good parts of Halo with the visuals that were promised in Halo 2 if not quite delivered. A little repetition on a couple of levels, but there are some battles you’ll fight in this game that are larger I’ve ever participated in any game.

Bungie kept saying there were huge encounters. They weren’t kidding.

I will say this, three of us took turns playing through the campaign with the sole mission of trying to finish it as fast as possible. We beat it in about eight hours. We played Heroic as I wanted to make sure we finished the game in time for the review. No, we didn’t all get to play at once. Players only have the option of playing two people to a screen on the same 360.

So. The campaign.

Tale of Woe

When last we saw the Chief, he was riding a ship back to earth to “finish the fight.” More than a few of us were pissed off at that ending. We’d already waited to finish the fight.

You see a star-filled sky. A comet of some kind, wrapped in fire, slashes across the sky and then a piece of it breaks off and heads your way. Apparently, the Master Chief didn’t want to wait for the damaged ship to come to a proper landing and bailed out sans parachute, rocket pack, escape pod or anything that might otherwise cushion his landing.

When Sgt. Johnson and crew find him, he looks dead; the armor’s locked up and he’s not moving. One of the marines takes a computer to Chief’s armor, gets him unlocked and he finally shows signs of life.

He doesn’t have time to bleed, after all. There’s a war to finish. What follows are nine levels of massive battles. You go from jungles to cities to underground bases and back to cities. You fight in narrow tunnels and then move out to massive expanses of open areas where you might, perhaps, have to fight four or five wraiths. You fight the flood. You battle on earth, on Halo and somewhere… else.

It’s difficult to talk about the campaign without ruining it for you. I promise you there’s at least one “holy s@!*” moment on every level in the game.

The AI is improved. The grunts, in particular, are much more cunning than they used to be. A good shot to their buggy faces still takes care of them, but they’ll try to outmaneuver you. They’ll dive behind cover, sometimes even climbing on top of it. When they get really crazy, they’ll pop two stickies at once and try to stick you with both of them.

The Brutes are much worse and don’t even get me started about the Flood. It’s not so much that the Flood are smart, it’s that they live up to their name, coming after you in wave after wave after wave. When it comes to the Flood, you might just be better off running.

About the third or forth mission in, we figured out where to turn campaign scoring on. Pretty cool. It’s like playing a gun-toting version of Death Race 2000. Fifty points for a Brute; +20 if you get the headshot; +1000 if you kill a bigger, more powerful enemy.

Which brings us to something else: after every level in the campaign, you get to see a post-game lobby that functions more or less the same way the post-game lobbies look like after a multiplayer match. Kill statistics, deaths, how big of a bad guy you took out, time multipliers for finishing in a shorter amount of time (yes, you get a point bonus for finishing faster).

This’ll add a lot to the replay potential of the campaign. We kept saying, “dude, I can’t wait to play this over Live with four people on Legendary.”

I think that’ll have some effect, perhaps, on how much people enjoy this game.

I read an article online about a month or so ago about “the death of the single player game.” Seems like it came out about the same time as Bioshock. Seems like an appropriate time to talk about that.

I agree. I think the days of the single-player, non-coop campaign are going to go the way of the dodo. Sure, Assassin’s Creed isn’t going to have a multiplayer component. Maybe that’ll be the last one.

How many people are still raving about Bioshock? Its lifespan is limited by the length of its campaign. You finish it, it goes back on your game shelf (or to EB or Gamestop for trade-in on the “next great game”) and the most you’ll say about it in the future will be, “Yeah, that was a pretty cool game.”

Playing with friends FTW.

Bungie isn’t stupid. They’ve taken lessons learned from the billions of MP games played and applied them to their campaign and created something with massive replayability. There’s nothing like it out there (and yes, I played Gears of War co-op; Halo 3 > Gears of War.) All that is great, and I’ll stop short of piling on fanboy superlatives, but what really elevates the experience of Halo 3 is the story.

Wha?

The story moves and feels like a movie. There’s actually some decent writing and there are as many “holy s@#!” moments in the cut scenes as there are in the game play. Partly the story is better because they never cut away from the Master Chief.

In shorter-form literature, it’s typically considered a bad move to hop from one narrative point of view to another. Stick with one and go. They do that this time and succeed in giving the story more emotional weight. There’s also a load of nods to the novels. You don’t have to have read them, but if you have, your Halo 3 experience will be richer.

The vote around here is that the story is just as good as that of Half Life 2 and that it’s better than what you find in Bioshock. What I know for sure is that the last level of Halo 3 is one of the best times I’ve ever had playing a video game and couldn’t be more a more appropriate denouement for the series. Everything you loathed about the end of Halo 2 they got right with Halo 3.

Just whatever you do, watch until the credits are finished.

Trust me.

Wait, Dude. How Does It Look?

I’ve played Gears of War and Bioshock, arguably the two prettiest games for the Xbox 360. Halo 3 might not have the gritty detail of Gears, but it makes better use of HDR than Gears did. There are many moments (and some of them even in the multiplayer maps) where your jaw will drop because it’s just so damn pretty.

I think, honestly, Bioshock is prettier than Halo 3, but who the hell wants to play alone?

There are some patches where it looks like they didn’t get to finish the polish.

Most the time, I imagine you’ll be able to find something that’ll blow your mind. From the moment you step into the jungle… individual leaves, dust particles floating in the air in a sunbeam. The water looks like real, and changes visual properties depending on how you’re looking at it, what it’s flowing over, how much sunlight is hitting it and whether or not there’s loose sediment on the ground.

Seems to me comparing and contrasting the graphics between games is not unlike a pixilated Johnson-measuring contest, and it’s a no-win anyway. If you say, “but Halo’s visual style is different than that of Gears or Bioshock,” it sounds like you’re making an excuse.

I think we’re finally starting to get into the era of game design where we need to start talking about art direction. We’re now comparing cinematography, not just level of detail. There are bigger things to consider.

One of the implications of calling a game “next gen” is reconciling ourselves to the fact that games are growing up and if we’re going to start considering them art, then we need to embrace things like genre-differences within a “type of game,” and “art direction” instead of pixel counts and frame rate (frame rate is mostly silky smooth, though there are some places where it chugs a bit).

So what’s it going to be?

In any case Halo 3 is beautiful, whether you’re playing the campaign or multiplayer.

A lot of people complained about the graphics in the Beta. It was my understanding the build of the game we played in the Beta was four, five months old by the time we got our controllers on it, that we weren’t looking at retail finish.

The bar’s been raised considerably. Wait until you wander the halls of Guardian. Wait until you check out the dunes of Sandtrap. Hell, wait until you see what they’ve done to Zanzibar…

I hope you have an HDTV… if not, maybe this is the excuse you need to go get one.

MP: This Ain’t Yo Momma’s Beta

Microsoft didn’t let us get online during our review period, so we have no tales of matchmaking The same, but different.

I won’t go over the maps from the beta. You were there. You played them. I will say there’ve been subtle geometry changes to Valhalla (the Pelican has been moved) and it’s much more graphically impressive than before. The ledges in the back are lower, and won’t be the VIP bunkers they were before.

Here are the ones you haven’t seen: Construct: It’s a tight, vertical map with open sides, and four or five levels. You can almost always see your enemies’ red dots on the map and those are almost always right on top of you. The trick is trying to figure out just how close they really are.

Epitaph: Yeah, it looks like a cathedral. It has two main halls that cross each other, three or four vertical levels and tons of ramps and shield doors. Every thing looks the same.

The Pit: Holy hell, I love this map. Picture one of those FBI shooting ranges where you walk through the fake town and shoot the cardboard bad guys. That’s what the setting of The Pit is. It’s a maze of ramps, cargo containers, scrolling Brute paper targets and cubby holes. It feels big, but it’s hard to avoid the action.

It’s a sort of a symmetrical map. If you fold it in half, both sides are mirror images. The sides are the same, but the front is different from the back. The same can be said for Isolation, which I won’t bother covering as it’s been out on other sites with screenshots for the better part of a week.

Narrows: Narrows is exactly what it looks like: one of those bridges from “Assault on the Control Room” from Halo with the same sort of mirrored symmetry as I mentioned in The Pit. Fold it in half, mirror images. What that means is that man cannons are on the same side and fire basically straight into each other. You can cross the bridge, which is arced to decrease the line-of-site for the snipers (the rifles you’ll find under the front of each base, middle level). This map is going to rule for CTF. Don’t think Elongation when you see it.

Guardian: I know people have been comparing it to Lockout, and sure, I guess, there are some basic similarities. But it’s not lockout. The layout isn’t close. There aren’t a lot of long lines-of-sight. There are multiple levels, rooms, twists and turns, and it’s packed to the gills with all manner of guns.

Sandtrap: Yeah, it’s big, but it’s not that big. You can get from one end to the other fairly quickly on a mongoose. There are huge buildings in the middle and plenty of cover, so you can walk. There are vehicles and guns all over the place, and be sure to check out the sand.

The Elephant looks really cool, but damn it’s slow. I can’t wait to see what CTF is going to be like when you move the bases closer to each other.

One of complaint is that it’s not actually big enough. We envisioned from Frankie’s descriptions that it’d be big enough to drop in four scorpions per team and go at it Big Tank Battle style. It’s really not big enough for that kind of thing. I’m sure with Forge we’ll get to try it out and see if he’s wrong.

It also defaults with the Banshee instead of the Hornet. The Hornet is pretty cool as far as vehicles go, but I’ll get to that in a minute.

I can’t tell you how any of these maps play for anything other than Free-for-all. Microsoft or Bungie, whomever, had it turned off for the weekend. We didn’t get to go have matchmaking joy without you. As a parting comment on MP, the Chief runs a bit faster and jumps a bit higher than he did in the Beta. It felt a little off then. Now it feels like Halo again.

I Need Guns. Lots of Them.

First things first: the BR.

I know a lot of people who’ll be really happy that the BR has been tightened since the beta, and it appears to fire faster. I like it better than the carbine. That said, in close range, with AR vs. BR, the AR wins. What seems like what is happening is that BR is great for fine aiming adjustments, especially at some distance, but when you try to swing it around in closer quarters, it becomes more like trying to aim with the sniper rifle – only there’s no one-shot kill. Keep it in mind. It’s not the super weapon from Halo 2, but it’s still nasty. In Halo 3, every weapon has a proper distance for which to use it. You’d better have the right tool for the job.

Gravity Hammer: Insanely overpowered. Massive melee damage and then it has that giant shockwave that’ll knock over cars and send rockets spiraling back into space. With default settings, you’re going to want to Forge this dude out of the map.

How overpowered? I ran at Malice with a shiny new overshield and he one-hit killed me. From the front. Insta-death FTW!

Flamethrower: This one’s also overpowered, but it looks damn cool. You hose someone down with a gout of flame, they’re toast.

Firebomb Grenade: Like a GameFuel sized can of firey goodness. They stick to people and surfaces like napalm and drop shields very quickly.

Brute Maulers: They look and sound awesome, but their range is non-existent. Lethal up close, but you’d better have two of them, or be ready to swing. Like the rest of the Brute weapons, it’s got a crooked knife on the bottom. I’d take pleasure in guttin’ you, boy.

One of our testers concerns was that MLG won’t utilize the full set of guns, instead creating gametypes that cannibalize what seems to be a pretty balanced weapon set. In lieu of BXB/BXR/ETC, we’ve got a whole array of dual wieldable weapons. That said, they’re probably overpowered at short ranges. You might be able to kill a guy with a sword now while dual wielding.

The sword has been mostly nerfed. It has limited uses and the lock-on is shorter and slower. It’s still beastly, but it’s not the scourge of the map it was on Halo 2. The Halo shottie is back and devastating. Within range, it’s a one-shot kill. Have yet to try it on Live, however.

I sat in my living room and listened to our testers debate a default weapons set vs. basically a Halo 2 MLG weapons set. The gist of their discussion is this: in an MLG set, barring button combos, everyone starts with the same weapons and battles are based more on skill and controlling map resources; in a default weapons set, the game is more rock/paper/scissors (not that there’s no skill involved). It was an interesting philosophical debate, but maybe just boils down to a difference in play styles.

What we will say is that the dual wieldable weapons are perhaps just a bit too overpowered. If you run around a corner with your assault rifle and someone’s got a couple of spikers, start making funeral arrangements. If there’s any gun that needs a tweaking, it’s the Spiker.

The Right Equipment for the Job

There are some equipment options you’ll see in campaign that aren’t available in multiplayer. I won’t ruin the surprise for you on those, but I will cover the couple new ones I’ve seen in MP.

Regenerator: Remember the Tree of Life in Shadowrun? Yeah, this is exactly the same thing. Hell, I’d be surprised if Bungie didn’t throw it in the game after they’d played Shadowrun.

Radar Jammer: Doesn’t really jam your radar, it just makes it look like it’s crawling with bad guys. If you’re going to leave the radars on (which unlike in Halo 2, if you shut them off, they vanish entirely from the HUD), it’ll look like you’ve just been overrun by the Flood. I can see the strategic possibilities.

Flare: It’s exactly what it sounds like, and if the other team throws it at you, you’re screwed. Your screen goes white and all you can see is their tag.

Oh, the Armor

Almost forgot. You start out with two types of armor, basically. The Mark VI and the C.Q.B. You have to unlock the rest. There area at least 10 helmets, seven different set of shoulders and six different “bodies.” We played through the campaign and only managed to unlock the E.V.A. shoulders and body and the Scout Helmet. I can only assume we sucked too much in the campaign or perhaps that the rest can only be gotten via Matchmaking.

Nevermind the achievements, give me the helmets.

Masterchief Theatre

Near as I can tell, your Halo 3 makes available a quantity of your recently played games for you to view, and then you select from that list what you’d like to save. We’re talking campaign and multiplayer.

Just like they’ve told us, you have total control over a saved film. You can detach the camera and do monitor’s-eye view of the action. You can pause, fast forward and rewind. You can take screen shots (I have an awesome one of me killing one of our testers Matrix-style on Isloation that I’ll get loaded up soon as the Embargo is lifted).

For competitive teams, the film thing is going to change the game. You know how the Patriots like to illegally film the other teams so they can be better prepared? Now you can do that, too. You have game film of your competition.

If you don’t know how a team beat yours, go back and watch the video. Plus, you can have your entire team with you in the lobby and discuss it as a group.

Play time is over, kiddies. How good your teams are is up to your dedication to practicing and studying game film.

One of our testers, by the way, hates this. He has a whole bag of sneaky tricks he uses to get the advantage of his opponents – routes, nade throws, feints, etc. – and now anyone can see what he does. No more secrets.

Forging the Future

Each camp is going to be able to create exactly the Halo 3 multiplayer it wants.

It’s not something I can “review.” Basicaly, you now have the tools to make this game yours. Once you’ve made your maps and game types, you can upload them for the world to share. And you can change everything about the maps. You can clutter it up with scenery, equipment, vehicles, spawn points, teleporters… if it’s in the game, you can put it in the game.

Frankly, I haven’t had enough time to play with it, but I think I understand its implications, and they’re pretty awesome. Bungie has basically said, “Okay, it’s yours now. Do with it as you will.”

Finish the Review

Campaign: great time. I won’t call it the greatest game ever, but it’s the most fun I’ve ever had playing a game. It’s easily the best of the Halo series. Four-player Co-op will give the campaign legs neither of the other Halo games had.

Multiplayer: It’s still Halo. It’s not the same game we’ve been playing. It’s evolved. If you hated the Halo gameplay before, you still will, though most of the balancing problems have been fixed.

It’s a helluva game. The only negative I can really say about it is that it’s still Halo. It’s the pinnacle of what Halo can be. Bungie’s reasserted its position as King of the FPS hill. Hell, this may just be the best console game ever made.

Have fun standing in line and see you in matchmaking.