First Look: Halo 3 is Here

After all these years and a massive console upgrade, Bungie and Microsoft's epic first-person shooter is still Halo. That's mostly a good thing.

Try it Now!

Introduction
"Commander, this is Kilo Two-Three," crackles your helmet radio. "Lost my wingman and our only Hog." You're puzzling where Kilo Two-Three could be when a couple squealing Grunts lob bursts of green plasma in your squad's direction. Too late--your force shield sizzles as you jerk left. Explosions thoom-thoom-thoom somewhere up ahead. An enemy ship swoops in low on your left flank, tilts open, and spits out reinforcements. Distant beams of pulsing light rise from alien monoliths against a horizon that tapers strangely upward, curving toward a circular zenith like some giant, galactic bracelet. Behind you, Scorpion tanks trundle forward to back your assault. You scope a group of juking enemies with your battle rifle, scanning for a headshot, waiting, waiting...and as the cellos and drums kick up, it hits you--they didn't change a thing.
Our hero looks even better on the Xbox 360.Really. In fact, Halo 3 turns out to be so reliably "Halo" in terms of its story and shoot-everything gameplay--even the order in which series hallmark villains appear--that you might imagine you're playing a remake of the original. A really pretty remake, to be sure, and one that manages to finally spill a few secrets some have been waiting six years to uncover, but with Halo 3 Bungie isn't really out to change hearts and minds. This is still the same Homeric shooting gallery you played back in 2001 muscled up for a higher-definition audience with some extra toys, overhauled multiplayer, and of course, plenty of "Can you give me a hoo-ah, soldier?"


Back in the Fight
The original Halo involved a genetically enhanced super-soldier with two first names (Master Chief) battling a fanatically religious alien race known as the Covenant over an orbital construct inspired by writer Iain Banks' Culture--a synthetic space habitat cum interstellar weapon shaped like a hoop. The sequel let you again play as the Chief, but also intermittently as his defeated Covenant nemesis, the Arbiter. Their stories dovetailed in a dash to stop a parasitic race called the Flood from spreading while simultaneously preventing the one weapon capable of instantly destroying the Flood (but also the known universe) from firing. Halo 3 picks up shortly after Halo 2 ends, depositing you as Master Chief on earth in the midst of a full-scale Covenant invasion.
The same epic vehicle battles have made their way into Halo 3.Making your way thorugh the game involves sniping, strafing, slicing, and gun-butting enemies capable of the same and more as you battle through gorgeously realistic (albeit one-way) jungles with bendable flora, dusty ravines, pine forests, industrial wastelands, military bases, and, occasionally, the insides of glinting alien ships and facilities. Enemies are more engaging than ever, shouting tactics to each other, teasing "I want his head on a pike" (or was it "bike"?) when you die, and joking "No inappropriate touching" when crowding toward your hiding place.
Levels, while linear in general, are now broader with multiple attack approaches. Fed by the Xbox 360a??s ability to display more objects in finer detail, canopied rivers and ridges become crisscrossing webs of sniper fire as Covenant Jackals perch in enormous trees or snuggle into distant cliffside cubbyholes that are tough to spot but easy to be hit from. You're forced to probe more tactfully if you play the game at its intended ("heroic") difficulty setting. Enemies seem smarter, darting in to and out of cover with frightening alacrity, and tending to advance using cover while moving at right angles instead of bum-rushing carelessly.
Weapons and Multiplayer
The screen shifts to a third-person view for Halo 3's massive new support weaponsThe series' two weapon maximum remains, though your second weapon is now visible (on your back or in a leg holster) eliminating "hide the powerful weapon" multiplayer trickery. If you want to stop projectiles (but not bodies), you can deploy temporary see-through bubble shields, perhaps best appreciated playing "territory" mode in multiplayer, where a well-placed defensive shield forces attackers to fight as close range. Paired with an able offensive team that approach can produce shut-out wins. You can also drop trip mines and lay "grav lifts," which not only levitate people and general objects, but vehicles as well.
But it's probably the game's online modes that keep Halo 3 from being more than just a pretty shooter riding franchise coattails. All the standard multiplayer modes are here, including a four-player cooperative campaign option, but a few like "Oddball" (hold a skull to earn points--it's like Hamlet with guns) and "Infection" (you're a zombie, infect your friends and enemies) play above and beyond. Out of the box, Bungie already includes dozens of "sub" modes for literally thousands of creative possibilities.


Map Creation and Films
The maps themselves seem a little small this time--nothing as grand as Halo's original snowy horseshoe monster, "Sidewinder," for instance--but if you're more of a "mosh" player, they're a claustrophobic dream come true. Or if they're not, nothing quite matches the power of Bungie's bundled "Forge" tool, which lets you literally redesign aspects of existing maps, working within a budget to change variables like spawn locations, item placement, and re-spawn rates. Herea??s the even-cooler part: You can mod solo, or network in a group of friends.
Record the best moments of your battles and play them back later.Once you've created something, you can upload it to Halo's version of a social networking space to share saved games, maps, custom-edited film clips of played games, and screen grabs--up to 25 MB worth. If you're really into it, you can bump that space up to 250 MB for 750 Microsoft Points.


The Final Verdict
So what's wrong with Halo 3? Not a lot, but after all the buildup in Halo 2, it's worth asking the following: Why can you only play as the Arbiter in cooperative mode during the campaign? For a character whose story was arguably more interesting than Master Chief's, the Arbiter's reduced to little more than a silent computer-controlled drone here. And why does the Arbiter go down from a lethal blow over and over, yet recover moments later, fully healed? (It feels a little gimmicky.)
How come you can still burst loudly into enemy area after area, yet no one seems to know you're coming? (You'd think the bad guys never heard of radios.) Why do the environments looks so great, but character models, especially faces, have all the expressiveness and lip-sync articulation of rubber masks? Why, without the aid of secondary storage device like memory cards, must you still sacrifice your progress to replay completed campaign levels? And why does everyone else know where to go in these games, but you don't? For a guy called "Master Chief," you sure play a lot of follow-the-leader.
Does it "finish the fight?" Perhaps. It feels shorter than Halo 2, though it's also much harder setting for setting difficulty-wise. It's not the best looking Xbox 360 game (Gears of War has its number, there), and it certainly doesn't have the best story (BioShock), but Halo's (and Bungie's) skills lie in synthesizing all of the above to produce games with maximum appeal and minimal compromise. Halo 3 probably isn't the best Xbox 360 game you'll play this year, but with its endlessly inventive online options, it's close.
Halo 3
Platform: Xbox 360


Developer:
Bungie
Publisher:
Microsoft

ESRB Rating: Mature
PCW Rating: 85



Local Articles
Software
Home