Game reviews: Halo 3: ODST – Review

Developer: Bungie
Publisher: Microsoft Game Studios
Platform: Xbox 360
Rating: R16
RRP: $99.95/$159.95 (collector’s pack)

Tone Rating: 3.5/5

Hang on, wasn’t Halo 3 supposed to be the last of the Halo FPS games? Apparently not. You can hardly blame Microsoft and developer Bungie for not killing off the franchise; after all, the Xbox is the house that Halo built.

Whatever, gamers don’t give a monkey’s about the economics, they’ll just be thrilled to have another game, even if it’s confusingly titled and doesn’t feature Halo stalwart Master Chief.

Instead of playing as the big guy, in the campaign mode you split your time between four orbital drop shock troopers (hence ODST) who get tipped out of an aircraft into New Mombasa, an Earth city under attack from the Covenant. The drop doesn’t go to plan and the squad members are separated. You wake up playing the Rookie, six hours after the drop. The rest of the game is spent finding out what happened to your team and trying to reunite everyone. To do that, of course, you get to shoot stuff. So far so standard.

What’s clever about ODST, though, is the way the story unfolds. Although you spend most of your time as the Rookie, you also jump back in time through a series of flashbacks to experience what’s happened to the other troops since the drop. These side missions are great, and are composed largely of a series of set piece firefights that employ the standard tropes of FPS gaming: a sniper mission, vehicle play, defending a tactically important area, and so on. The flashback sequences are the best parts of the solo campaign.

So it’s a shame that these sections are so brief. No sooner do you settle in as one character than you get flipped back to the Rookie, only to end up trudging around New Mombasa in search of a good punch-up.

The city environment is immense, but when playing as the Rookie it is incredibly dark and dingy, meaning you lose much of the detail Bungie’s developers spent months creating.  This is only slightly mitigated by the introduction of a night visor, a piece of equipment new to the Halo series. This increases contrast and creates visible outlines for characters and key scenery – baddies are outlined in red, humans in green, clues to help you find out what’s happened to your mates are in yellow…

All up, the campaign takes around six hours to complete. You can spend time wandering around, but once you’ve cleared a section of enemies (either a piece of cake or desperately difficult, depending on your settings) and found your clues, there’s really not a lot to do.

Ultimately the campaign feels like an expansion pack. That’s fine, except gamers are being charged full price and the solo mode on its own isn’t really worth $100. However, there are other things to entice the interested, particularly if they are fans of multiplayer.

First is a cool new mode called Firefight. This is a co-op scenario for up to four players similar to Gears of War 2′s Horde mode, wherein you repel wave after wave of Covenant attacks. Players share a limited pool of lives and health packs, meaning you really have to look out for each other.

The other drawcard is a second disc of all the previously released Halo 3 multiplayer maps plus three new ones, making 24 in total. This’ll annoy the hell out of the truly committed, who will already have downloaded most of them, but casual Haloists will welcome the chance to buy everything in one go.

ODST, though respectable enough to look at, isn’t the most handsome FPS on the block; the Halo 3 engine is showing signs of age and Johnnies-come-lately such as Gears of War 2 have better graphical detail and more natural movement. Audio is great, though, and the orchestral score is particularly atmospheric.

It’s a difficult game to review, is Halo 3: ODST. The half-formed campaign doesn’t really justify the investment, and nor, separated from that solo mission, do the multiplayer modes, good as they are. As a whole package, though, it just about does enough to tide gamers over until the next Halo game. Cos you just know there’s gonna be a next Halo game, don’t you?

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