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Halo 3 Game Review
By Naked Crook
The New Order Administrator
Halo 3 was expected to be the smash hit of 2007, and continue to be a powerful presence on the Xbox 360 well into 2008, 2009 and hopefully into 2010. It was expected that the popularity of this game would rival anything that the Playstation 3 or the Nintendo Wii could ever offer to their user base. However, due to shoddy engineering, numerous shortcomings and various problems with the game, Halo 3's popularity has died out and is no longer one of the most commonly played games on Xbox Live. With fewer then 7 hours of storyline (as opposed to 10-11 hours on Halo 1 and 11-12 hours on Halo 2), missing features that should have been a no-brainer to include such as custom game searching, and an all-in-all more exciting, immersive experience, Vehicle and character physics that can be best described as horrible, and multilayer maps as boring and awful as sin, Halo 3 was nothing short of a disappointment and is not worthy to carry the name of Halo.
To help the readers evaluate how I feel about this game during the course of this review, I will use the star system. We will start at 5 stars. After each paragraph, you will see whether the game loses or gains stars based on how much I praise or trash the game. We will start with 5 stars. How I feel about the game is unrelated to the final score it is given at the end of the review.
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Halo 3, as any intelligent individual could see, was filled with more than its share of problems. However, these problems are not categorized as graphical issues, glitches, screw ups, or any other label such as. These problems can be best describes as needless content. Yes, I did say before that Halo 3 was missing some no-brainer features, but it was missing necessary features. Bungie did everything it could, it seems, to includes useless features and leave out the most important ones. For example: Lets say for arguments sake, that the Master Chief weighs in at around...700 lbs...a conservative estimate you will undoubtedly agree. Why is it that a 700 lb man can be carried downstream by a "river" as deep as a puddle? If you do not know what I am talking about, load Halo 3, start a multilayer game on Valhalla, walk to the little river and die there and watch what happens. This is a stupid, needless, useless feature that I would not have noticed if it wasn't there. I would never wish for this feature in a game like Halo 3 because it is useless. I would gladly trade this feature for something more useful to me...I don't know...lets say custom game searching, better vehicle physics, a REAL map editor, more immersive storyline, or perhaps even a working human sniper rifle. You Tube is filled with videos showing how broken the human sniper rifle is! However, I digress, but I will come back to the shoddy engineering later on in this review. In short, Halo 3 was missing too many necessary features and included too many unnecessary one to be called a good game. We cannot even call this an average game with all the content that it is missing.
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The Halo 3 campaign was something of a love-hate relationship. There were things I hated about it and there were things that liked or enjoyed. I believe in fairness so in the interest of fairness, I will note some things that I did enjoy about Halo 3 (though there are not many). I am going to start with everyone's favorite part of the review - the parts I hated. Primarily, I hated the environment, I hated the level design, and I hated the ambiance. Let me now be more specific. When a city gets decimated and leveled by orbital bombardment, there are usually giant craters, burning buildings, destroyed terrain, and smoke filled and black skies. However, on the third mission, Tsavo Highway, it was almost the exact opposite. There were blue skies (as opposed to red, burning skies in Halo 2, think back to Outskirts and Metropolis), there was a little bit of scatter debris (yes, as opposed to Outskirts and Metropolis again which had destroyed, leveled buildings). It seems that Bungie thought it was logical to have more destruction pre-occupation than post-occupation. Good thing the brutes came along to help Earth clean up its act, don't you all agree? All jokes aside, there is one exception to my criticisms. In the level Floodgate, after you come to the part where you are trying to get into the crashed carrier to rescue Cortana, there was lots of fire, destruction and debris. That would be putting it very simply. It was a very fitting atmosphere for such an event. This, quite frankly, is what all of your time on earth should have looked like. Occupations are not clean and organized events. They involve much destruction and the game should have reflected this. Generally, The problem with Halo 3's campaign was a total failure to create a convincing atmosphere. With aesthetics aside, I must admit that the four player co-op business was a brilliant idea. Payroll increase for whoever suggested this concept. This added a new dimension to the game and a new level of fun. I must admit, Halo 3 did beat Halo 1 and Halo 2 in this category. In terms of level design, Bungie fails. The levels were recycled. For example in the second mission, you must run from the command center to the docking bay, back to the command center and then to the barracks and then back to the command center. I wouldn't complain if this was an isolated incident but this happened in almost every mission! In the mission Cortana, That mission can best be described as a lap routine you run in Grade 9 gym class. I believe they call it a single destination relay (that's what my teachers called it anyways) It primarily involves from point A, to point B, back to point A except in real world relays you do it 4 or 5 times. The point is, the mission length was doubled by doing this. Some would call it genius, I call it repetitive.
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The multiplayer was the worst part of Halo 3. It was interesting for one day before it got redundant. I played it anyways because I didn't have a game like Call of Duty 4 on hand. No custom game searching killed the multiplayer. Yes you have custom games and yes you can invite people from your friends list but I only have like 6 people on my friends list who play Halo and they are usually never on at the same time. Some make the argument that I can invite recent players but I don't wanna wait ten minutes to get a game going, I want to play a custom game of CTF or KoTH in seconds. What was so hard about making a system like Halo 1 PC had? Perhaps even throw a bit of matchmaking in there, but instead of getting players by rank, get players by preferred game type. The match making is even worse. 85% of the game type/map combinations on matchmaking suck. If I don't wanna play assault on the level Foundy, I should have the option to omit this map from possible matches. We have the option to prefer and dislike players to increase and reduce the odds of being match made with them so why not include the option to prefer and dislike maps and game types? Speaking of maps, all but 5 maps in this game suck. The exceptions are Cold Storage, Standoff, Last Resort, High Ground and that Sidewinder remake (I never downloaded the new maps so I have no idea what it is called). Even blackout sucked and it was based on the best Halo 2 slayer map. Bungie really must have gone down the tubes. In retrospect, I am glad they separated from Microsoft because Microsoft is better off without them. Now, to add insult to injury, all the best game types are not even in matchmaking. Zombies was a great idea. I don't know of very many people who don't enjoy zombies. CTF is the greatest game type ever created. It is the ultimate form of team play. VIP is very much under appreciated because it is a game type reserved for players who are very tight knit. These players do everything together. You could call them a clan if you will. However these great game types just didn't get very much, if any, spot light in Halo 3. There should have been a dedicated play list for CTf and CTF only. There should have been a dedicated play list for every single game type in fact. Sadly, there wasn't and that is why the Halo 3 multiplayer fails. Did anyone else notice the fact that clan support was missing? I am not one for clans but I will say that a lot of people like clans. Speaking on behalf of those who like the clan aspect of games "Bungie...where is the clan support?"
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I made mention of the shoddy engineering earlier in this review. The sniper rifle is not the only example of this. This sorry excuse in the engineering can be seen in the graphics engine, the weapons, and in the very features of the game. Forge...I think that was thrown together in the final minutes before finalization because it sucks hard. That is not a map editor. Games like Age of Empires, Warcraft 3, Titan Quest, or even Counter-Strike have map editors. Halo 3 has a "place a limited amount of garbage on the map" editor. Furthermore, can someone please tell me who came up with 640p? If one of my programmers said they want to make the Xbox 360 flagship game run in 640p I would fire them. They would be jobless. There is no excuse to make this game run in anything lower then 720p. Was the programming so bad and inefficient that they couldn't even optimize their game to support 720p resolutions? It must have been because Call of Duty 4 looks 1000x better and it runs at least in 720p, possibly even 1080i, though I would guess 720p because the PS3 version runs in 720p. The Xbox may be different but I cannot make that assumption. In today's generation of game consoles, graphics is somewhat important. I don't think it's as important as game play or functionality but it is in the top 5 things to do well by in a game. this 640p business was a serious mistake by Bungie. On a side note, there is way to much bloom in this game when running on an HD television. As a safety precaution, wear sun glasses.
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The soundtrack in Halo 3 can be summed up with 1 word. Can you guess what that word is? If you guessed terrible, awful, horrible or any other mean word such as then you would have guessed WRONG. The soundtrack in Halo 3 is nothing short of a collection of compositional masterpieces composed by a very talented group of individuals. Martin O' Donnell and his crew did an excellent job on the soundtrack for this game. Thinking about the inspiring music of this video game makes me want to give this game a 5 star rating but as much as I want to I cannot. Sorry Marty, sorry your greatness had to be thrown into the wash with Bungie's lacking abilities. On a side note: I hope that Marty works on more games and gives these other games the gift of his musical genius.
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Halo 3 has very little going for it in terms of what is needed to make a great game, with exception to the wonderful music. Its graphics, only at times, are exceptional, while at other times they are abysmal. the campaign replay value is limited. The only time one could have fun replaying the campaign is when there is nothing else to do. the multiplayer is downright terrible and all the good game types were severely underutilized. Halo 3 failed to deliver on its potential and that is why I officially brand this game as A GAME THAT TRULY SUCKS.
Lets break it down into score categories:
- Multiplayer 2 / 5
- Graphics 3 / 5
- Story Mode 2 / 5
- Ambiance 1 / 5
- Functionality 1 / 5
- Music 5 / 5
- Overall 14 / 30 --- 46% ---FAIL
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Halo 3 - Video Game Review (Xbox 360)
03-12-2010
Linear Mode
