Halo 3: ODST review

It's on some level kind of pointless to review a new Halo game, and not only because every release in the series is destined to rack up huge sales figures regardless of critical reception. Rather, it's because the fundamental gameplay experience of playing a Halo game hasn't really changed since the first game came out in 2001. This is coming from an ardent fan of the series, someone who practically minored in the original Halo for the Xbox in undergrad. Believe it or not, we played that shit for two solid years in two-player splitscreen deathmatch mode. A deathmatch with two players is the first-person shooter equivalent of hitting a half-deflated volleyball against a basement wall and trying to hit it again before the second bounce, but who gives a fuck? Halo is just that much fun to play, and it's pretty well stayed that way. Yeah, Bungie has added a bunch of new guns, prettied up the graphics, and increased the sense of scale, but the only real earth-shaking change the series has seen is the addition of online multiplayer, which came about five years ago with Halo 2. At this point, you either know whether or not you'll like a Halo game, or you haven't ever played one.

For a series that seen so little substantive iteration in its core mechanics, the campaign mode in Halo 3: ODST is clearly geared as a throwback to the original Halo: Combat Evolved. You have to worry about finding healthpacks again, they've brought back a variant of the fan-favorite scoped pistol, and you can't dual-wield weapons anymore. They've also removed the vehicle-jacking mechanic, although you can still jump on a tank and throw a grenade in the engine to blow it up. Ostensibly, this is because you're playing as an ODST, a different and less powerful type of elite space marine from the main series' part-cyborg Master Chief. However, in the classic style of not fixing what isn't broken, there's not a great deal of functional difference in how these changes cause you to, except for making cover a bit more important in gunfights.

I was hoping that ODST would be a bit more narratively focused than the other Halo entries, as I think the Halo mythos is actually fairly compelling for a video game (I know), but it really isn't. ODST does feature the voice talents of several actors from the late, lamented Firefly TV show, which is probably a treat for people who care about that sort of thing (i.e., not me). There are some new-to-Halo bits grafted on in ODST, such as the vaguely non-linear gameplay in the New Mombasa overworld that forms the bridging device for the story segments and the discoverable audio logs in the vein of Dead Space/Bioshock/Batman: Arkham Asylum that tell the story of a young woman attempting to escape the city. Probably the best addition is the night-vision goggles, which are used extensively in the free roaming city bits; in most games, "enhanced vision" modes are very useful in gameplay but ruin the art design (Arkham Asylum is a particularly egregious offender in this area), but in ODST the effect is slick and more subtle.

I have a feeling that the relative brevity of the campaign in ODST might be a sticking point for some; it's probably only about seven hours of gameplay all told. I'd recommend that you play it in short bursts of an hour or so at a time, which is much easier to do because the missions are shorter than Halo 3's. Additionally, play it on at least 'Heroic' difficulty, which makes it more challenging and more fun; as with Halo 2 and Halo 3, the easier modes remove a lot of the flavor from the game.

ODST comes with two major multiplayer modes to supplement the campaign. The first, which comes on a bonus disc, is essentially the entire multiplayer portion of Halo 3 with all of the for-pay downloadable maps, which is a stupendous deal if you didn't already pay for Halo 3 and all its downloadable maps (yes, and no, in my case) and you can tolerate the odd cocktail of joy and frustration that is Halo 3 competitive multiplayer. By the latter, I mean that Halo 3 is an amazingly well crafted multiplayer game that's unfortunately suffused with homophobic 14-year olds with godlike deathmatch skills.

The second multiplayer mode, which is new entirely to ODST, is dubbed Firefight, and is essentially Gears of War 2's Horde mode. For those unfamiliar, the conceit is that teams of up to four players attempt to survive increasingly difficult waves of computer-controlled bad guys, with points assigned and tracked for each kill. I haven't actually played Firefight with other people yet, but I have jumped on solo a couple of times "just to see what it's like" and found myself playing for a half-hour plus each time. It's Halo distilled to its pure essence, and is therefore fun. Firefight seems to have more of an emphasis on point scoring than in Gears, with various multipliers being assigned for kill streaks and particular kinds of kills rather than the fixed point values in Horde mode. Satisfyingly, the point total for each kill pops up in the middle of the screen with a plus sign, Call of Duty 4 style. There's also more of a focus on resource management, with a limited pool of lives for players and only four healthpacks and a handful of weapons available (respawning every ten waves or so). I haven't delved too deeply into it yet, but my extensive experience with Gears of War 2 tells me that Firefight alone is probably worth the retail price of ODST, as it combines the fun of single-player Halo and the open-endedness of multiplayer Halo without the annoyances of competing against junior-high idiots. I'm pleased by the recent trend toward cooperative online gameplay this generation; Halo's always been a torch-bearer in this regard, and with Firefight poised to echo the popularity of Gears 2's Horde, I think that this type of gameplay mode is going to quickly become de rigueur in blockbuster shooters going forward. I've been toying with the idea of doing a blog-tribute to Horde mode. I may hold off until I have some more Firefight experience under my belt and expand that out into a general summation of why this type of multiplayer is such a good idea. In the meantime, if you buy ODST, hit me up on Xbox Live for a game!