Review #1: Halo 3 ODST
With the Halo Reach Multiplayer Beta right around the corner, some of us are still in debate on the game that allows us access: ODST. Halo 3: ODST is an expansion pack/game to Halo 3 that was under a lot of scrutiny for its price. While Bungie Studios claimed that it was an expansion pack with some perks, and should be priced at around $45, Microsoft decided that since it was a Halo game, that it should be priced higher, to a typical 60 dollars. Some people out there were very offput about it, and did not like the idea of paying 60 dollars for something that was supposed to be priced much lower, and probably would not offer nearly as much as a full game. Well, ladies and gentlemen, for those of you still on the fence, I am going to change your minds.
From the last sentence of that paragraph, you probably think I'm going to sit here and praise ODST for being the “BESTAST HALO GAEM AEVR”. However, I will not. I've played this game a lot, and I've listened to others' qualms about this game. I'll be presenting it not as a “good game” or a “must buy”, but simply a validation for the 60 dollar pricetag that was put on it. However, luckily for you, the game can be bought now for around 30 dollars depending on where you shop. Now, it's a great game for a great bargain, and you really shouldn't miss out on what it has to offer.
Your first $30: The Campaign
Originally, this is what ODST was going to be, back when it was Halo 3: Recon. Just a short, 4 hour or so long campaign, for around 40 dollars. Fortunately for us, ODST turned out to be much, much more. However, ODST's campaign is surprisingly strong, and actually stands out on its own as a good part of the Halo story. If you have ODST and haven't even played the campaign yet, do so. It's quite good, though there are people who disagree.
Basic premise: You are an ODST. ODSTs are not Spartans. You are not a Spartan. You are weaker, slower, and can't jump as high as the Master Chief. This is supposed to be a challenge. You're supposed to feel a little weaker. You no longer have shields, you have “Stamina” which is exactly like shields, only once the “shields” are gone, you have health to worry about. Yes, there are healthpacks. Anyway, on to the meat of it all.
I'd like to first point out that ODST's campaign is different than the typical Halo experience. It isn't all high action, and it certainly isn't as intense as the previous titles. It does not feature the Master Chief in any way, and we rarely see any characters returning from the previous storyline's cast. The story centers around an ODST squad that gets separated right after the giant Covenant Carrier slips out of New Mombasa in Halo 2. It should be noted that if you're a fan of Firefly, you'll probably get a geekgasm out of this game. It features the star cast of Firefly, re-designed as an ODST squad. You have Gunnery Sergent Buck, played by Nathan Fillion, and Lieutenant Veronica Dare, played by Trisha Helfer, as the two main characters featured in the story. Nolan North, Adam Baldwin, and Alan Tudyk play Romeo, Dutch, and Mickey, respectively. It's a reunion of sorts, but don't expect a total copy of Firefly; ODST is its own beast.
The story starts after you get aquainted with the squad, and they banter back and forth to establish their basic character traits: You have Buck, the quick-tempered and oddly emotional Sergent. Dutch, the gruff badass. Romeo, the wise-cracking black dude. Mickey, the “dumb kid” of the group. And of course, the sex symbol and ice-cold commander, Dare. They all go “blah blah” for a bit, while you're napping in the corner as the silent protagonist, The Rookie. Romeo goes and smacks you in the chest with a Sniper Rifle, and they employ an interesting device here: The second you get hit with the sniper rifle, you're thrust into first-person, like you were actually waking up from a nap or something. Dutch mutters some catchy one-liner, and hands you your weapon. Then comes the fun part.
You don't really realize what's going on until it happens, but you close your pod, get turned around, and suddenly you're 40,000 feet above the Earth, getting ready to be dropped onto a Covenant Carrier, waaaay down below. I'm not going to lie, the first time I saw this sequence in HD, I got chills. I won't really spoil what happens in the sequence, since it gets pretty intense, but long story short, things do not go as planned, and you end up unconscious and totally separated from your ODST squad. You wake up 6 hours later, and it's night outside. Your bleary and blurred vision spots two enemy Phantoms go by. The city around you is burning. Your vitals are low, you're stranded, and you have NO idea where you are...
This is where the ODST story begins, and also where it starts to differ from the typical Halo campaign. ODST is not per-say an action game. It isn't built for revolutionary gameplay, or stunning action sequences (Though there are a few). Mainly, this is built to be an art game. The visual detail is stunning, and the whole visual style of the game is absolutely beautiful. I think this displays itself the most when the game puts you in the night sequences. Turning on the Visor really brings the environment to life, and shows you details you would have otherwise missed. The game has a unique feel to it, being alone and stranded in an occupied city at night. If you allow yourself to get into the game, you'll really start to feel excited.
Now, this is not the entirety of ODST's campaign. You aren't just wandering around a dark city all the time. When you find certain objects within the city, they trigger a flashback event, where you get to play your typical, high-action, gut-busting, adrenaline-packed Halo level. They tell you the story of what happened to your squad, and what you missed in the last six hours. They feel a lot more like Halo, and will give you that Halo fix you'd been waiting for.
Some people really have a problem about how this is done. They hate running around in the city, waiting to get to the high-action parts of the game. I do see their point. The parts where you're trying to get from place to place are rather long, and if you don't know what you're doing, and you're just rushing though the game, you'll probably REALLY hate these parts. But I think the nighttime parts are what make the game so special. The environment is beautiful, and the MUSIC. Marty has really out-done himself on ODST. The musical score during these parts is PHENOMINAL. Every time you exit a high-action mission, you're brought back down to earth with an eerie, solemn, almost haunting soundtrack that merges you seamlessly back into the blackened city and dark atmosphere. I definitely got chills listening to the music as I plodded along, alone, in the wet streets of a destroyed New Mombasa...
And yet still, some people hate these sequences. Now, frankly, I think these people just aren't playing the game right, but then again there is no “right way” to play a game. For some people, they'd probably just want to skip right to the places where you could get all the achievements and be done with it. However, again, like I said, I feel that if you really sit down, relax, turn off the lights, and play this game at a moderate pace instead of trying to rush through everything, you'll find that ODST has a lot to offer in the atmosphere and nuance department. Get lost in the game, it'll help you enjoy it.
So enough about all that. The campaign in and of itself, if you play it on Bungie's recommended difficulty level (Heroic), actually totals out to be around 8 hours of gameplay. May not seem like much, but if you play it at a moderate pace, you could probably extend this to about 10. For those who think this was short, keep in mind that originally, Bungie would have made you pay 40 bucks for a FOUR hour long campaign. So, don't feel cheated. That aside, I feel that the experience alone is worth it. I'd say that the campaign is worth about 30 bucks alone, but most would agree that they would have only paid about 20 once they'd completed the campaign.
I will say this, though the journey is very good, the actual ENDING of the game is rather...Anti-climactic. Though watch through the credits and you'll get a cool surprise =D.
Your next $10: Firefight
Firefight is one of those features that Bungie decided to throw in to help make this a full game. Firefight (Like you haven't heard about it already) is a lot like Gears of War's Horde mode. You and 3 other buddies (If you like) face off against an unlimited number of Covenant bad guys. You get your choice between all of the ODSTs characters in the game, depending on the amount of campaign you've played, and of course, minor color customization plus emblems.
Basic layout: Five waves in a Round, Three rounds in a Set, unlimited Sets. Bonus rounds come around at the end of every Set. Kill grunts and rack up a certain number of points to earn bonus Lives. One minor skull is turned on every Round, one bigger skull every set. Past Set five, all skulls are turned on. The more skulls are on, and the further you are along the road, the more score you rack up for kills. Headshots and specialty kills earn you more points than regular kills. You have a shared pool of lives for your team. In the words of the Halo announcer: Good luck.
Firefight starts with you facing off against normal enemies on whatever difficulty you've selected, and it adds skull modifiers to make the game “harder”. Notice I quoted that word. The Covenant come in random waves as you, and your job is to hold them back for 4 waves until you hit the fifth. The fifth wave always consists of a lot of Brutes and around 3-4 Chieftains. For those who do not know, Chieftains are big baddies with hammers of death. As an ODST, you can't outrun them, so you have to team up really well to take these guys out. After that, the Round ends, you get some extra lives, some ammo, an extra skull modifier, and the whole thing starts all over again until all the skulls (except Iron) are turned on. Sounds fun, right? It is, for a little while...
After a while, Firefight gets pretty repetitive, and once you've played through it enough, you'll start to notice some annoying factors. For one, once the Catch skull gets turned on (which is honestly, most of the time) all the enemies do is throw grenades at you. All the time. Some grunts even have a particular animation which makes them throw the damn things every half a second at you. So you'll spend most of your time in Firefight frantically trying to take out Grunts before they spam you to death, and dodging grenades if you happen to fail at your first task. This can get REALLY annoying, REALLY fast. Especially on the higher difficulties, where even getting touched by the side of a grenade blast seriously impacts your stamina. But it gets worse.
Black Eye is the next skull to be activated in the Rounds. makes you have to hit stuff for your Stamina to come back. Like, bash stuff with your gun. Enemy stuff. Let me point out to you that as an ODST, your melee attack SUCKS. I mean, sucks a fat nut. It usually takes about 3 melees to take down a Jackal, or 2 or 3 for a Grunt. You have to really lay some bullets into the Brutes before you can melee them down. So on top of grenade spam and all that, you now have to hit stuff to get your “shields” back. This may sound hard to you, but in a reality, it's more annoying than hard. It just creates frustrating and unnecessary difficulty for the player rather than challenging and rewarding difficulty. Basically, it challenges you in the wrong way.
Not to say that Firefight isn't fun, though. Firefight can be very fun when you're playing with a 4 man squad of awesomeness. Call it what you will, Firefight does test how good you are as a team. Especially on Legendary. Teams who make it past the first Set on Legendary are VERY good. I've had a lot of fun getting the Endure achievement as well: Surviving until the 5th set on Heroic. I've done this one a lot, and it's quite a challenge. For any Halo campaign guru, Firefight is a joy to play with friends, and is pretty much the best Co-op experience on the market right now. However, it doesn't work out so well with random people. You gotta play this one with friends. That's probably why Bungie didn't include Matchmaking support for it (Or time constraints...Either one, take your pick). Regardless, even with it's flaws, Firefight is worth your time and money. At least 10 bucks of your money, and lots of your time, to be precise.
Your final $10: The Multiplayer Disk
So this isn't too huge of a deal, but there are some benefits to this side of the deal. Bungie decided to package all the Halo 3 multiplayer content onto one disk for you. Sounds stupid, right? Well, it's actually worth the 10 bucks, because in addition to all the previous content, you now get the next set of Mythic maps with it. 10 bucks is the price of a map pack, normally, so really, you're just getting the next map pack, and the whole multiplayer game, all conveniently located on one disk. It's actually pretty nice, considering you can free up that 1-2 gigs of space on your hard drive by deleting all the previously downloaded maps you have. Also, if you've never played Halo 3 before (Whaaa?), this disk has all you need to get caught up on the multiplayer side of things.
Your bonus $10: The Halo: Reach Beta
This is a bargain from last time. Remember when you had to nab Crackdown for the last Beta? Well this time, it already comes packaged with a pretty good game. The Reach Beta is packed full of Halo goodness, giving you a preview of what's to come. From the looks of it, as you can see on my trailer writeup, it's going to be AWESOME. Well worth an extra 10 bucks. I mean hell, some people bought this game just FOR the Halo: Reach beta.
And that's also kinda why I'm writing this up right now. Most of you who haven't gotten ODST yet are debating on getting it for the Beta you've heard so much about. I'm here to tell you that if you nab up ODST, you won't just be paying 30 or 40 bucks for a Beta invite. You'll be getting a really good game to go along with it. So my recommendation to you is to get out there and nab a copy of ODST before May 3rd. You won't be disappointed with what you get.
This game gets the Real Gamer seal of approval =P. Get out there and prepare to drop!
Until next time, keep it real, gamers.
