Disappointing, but still multiplayer fun...

Author's Rating:

Pros: online fun

Cons: campaign mode, graphics, trueskill

The Bottom Line: 
for xbox live only!

Author's Review
I didn’t have the highest expectations for Halo 3: I figured that it would have boring single-player and good multiplayer. It really seems to me that Call of Duty 4 has a bigger buzz around it than Halo 3, and it’s easy to see why…

If you must know, there hasn’t been a FPS that has fully entertained me since Deus Ex, and that game won me over with its twist-filled plot, a skill system, and a whole world of weapon upgrades, biotech-like upgrades, etc. So maybe I’m not the best person to ask, but Halo 3’s single player is absolutely boring, even worse than Halo 2, and far worse than the original, which actually wasn’t bad. Not only is the campaign boring, I almost suspect that Bungie went out of their way to make it boring. Every time the game froze my Master Chief so Cortana (who’s been sexed up now, by the way) could say a few words, I groaned. The screen also shakes, which is incredibly lame, a common lament throughout single player.

I looked up the plot later on Wikipedia, and it’s actually not that bad. The thing is that Halo 3 does the worst job of storytelling I have ever seen a game do. With the ridiculous cutscenes (including very first one that was the lamest of all) that set a new bar for cheese, and mostly boring level design…see, I don’t really know. I can’t really pinpoint a few things to tell you why the campaign was so boring, but before even the halfway mark, I was playing just to finish it, and from about the 3rd to last level, I was hoping that each cutscene would mean the end of the game.

Halo 3 doesn’t even look all that great. Sure it’s good, but it looks only marginally better than Halo 2 did on an HDTV did. So it still holds up for now, but I bet in a year or two, the graphics will not be impressive at all anymore, while Halo 2’s graphics held up for quite a while. Voice acting also seems to be done as bad as possible on purpose. Levels are unimaginative, which comes to be a problem in multiplayer play as well. If you don’t have Xbox Live or otherwise plan to play this game with other people on a regular basis, avoid this game completely. Oh, and I played co-op so don’t tell me that playing with a friend helps to dull the pain…

Now on Xbox Live, I kind of play this game a lot. But since it’s my first online FPS, it may not be because Halo is so good, but because I haven’t played online before, so hold your horses, Halo fanboys! Halo uses something called TrueSkill to try to determine your skill, but it’s pretty wack. In Team Slayer, I notice that skill has almost nothing to do with how good the player is, unless there’s a huge difference in skill levels (like 10+). I also thought that since it’s called “True” skill, it would quickly determine if you were good and shoot you up the ranks quickly, but not really. It’s still kind of a slow rise. Also, it’s just based on wins and losses; I was expecting something like QB ratings: a mythical formula involving % of headshots, kill/death ratio, etc. If you play with friends that are better than you, you can easily piggyback them to get a skill rating you don’t deserve.

Maps are so unimaginative. First of all, most of them are symmetrical, which makes them boring, like Vahalla for instance. This is a level that someone could probably make with whatever map editor program Bungie has in about 2 minutes. Many are symmetrical but still fun, like the Pit, but really couldn’t they have spent some more time cooking up some zany maps?

Also, there’s no option to specifically play Slayer on the free-for-all playlists, and players can only veto a game once. So if you veto Swords, for instance, and the next gametype randomly chosen is Oddball, then tough noogies, I guess that’s what you’re playing. This means that you’ll be playing Oddball more often than you like. And it’s not just me; any time the option to veto Oddball comes up, it’s always vetoed by just about everyone.

That being said, there has been a fair amount of effort put into the core gameplay and it shows. Swords aren’t as deadly anymore because the lunge is not as long, so you won’t see people simply dominating with swords anymore. The shotgun has a slightly smaller clip than before. The plasma pistol’s energy level now decreases while you’re holding the charged shot, and that shot no longer homes in quite as much, which means you shouldn’t be killed by n00bs with that weapon anymore (in fact, almost no one uses it online). The sniper rifle is slightly harder to use now. The new weapons are quite good and balance out the game further. Case in point: the new Spartan Laser, or “Splaser”. It’s a laser shot that needs to charge up for a few seconds before sending out a shot that will kill any Spartan in one shot and destroy many vehicles. Only problem is that while it’s charging up, it will send out a laser beam, which means that you’re not going to catch anyone by surprise with this weapon, and it’s hard to keep the beam focused on someone who’s jumping and twisting about to avoid it. But it’s much easier to shoot down a Ghost, for instance, with it because it’s a bigger target that can’t be moved as precisely. So instead of complaining that using the Ghost to rack up kills is cheap, grab the Splaser! Online gameplay is fairly balanced and there's no real cheap tactics that people can use to dominate.

Bungie.net is also an incredible resource, with stats from every game you’ve ever played on Live, I think. Achievements are all shown there so you can see exactly how many Killing Sprees you’ve had, what weapon you've racked up the most kills with, your kill/death ratio, and much much more. You can also save movies and stuff from your last game so you can share them or look at them later. I don’t do this because I’m worried about the bandwidth…

And that’s where I get to the most annoying thing about Halo, for me. Bungie doesn’t have dedicated servers to host online play, so a player in the party will have the host the game. Not only does this lead to a few issues of fairness (the host seems to react a little faster), but it absolutely kills bandwidth, and if you live in a dorm like I do, there’s strict upload/download limits. I can still play quite a bit but not as much as I want, and you don’t have the choice to host or not host games, which is lame.

Anyway, Halo 3 is a finely crafted multiplayer game in terms of mechanics, weapons, and the like. There’s also an impressive array of stats and file sharing. Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as good as it could be. They have released a few new maps on the Live Marketplace and will be available to everyone for free in the spring, but really boring maps like Snowbound and Vahalla are inexcusable. And there’s a plethora of problems with the TrueSkill b.s. which is quite limited and seems broken at times. Oh and single player is almost painful to play.

But hey! You’re going to get Halo 3 if you want to play online because it’s quite good at its core and because everyone else is doing it. You can always always find a game on Halo 3. I’ll still be playing anyway. See you on Live! (gamertag: blee3000).

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