A halo 3 review in as many parts as I please...

[The Wooster]

The start of a balanced, if light, review of the 360 giant and flamebait, Halo 3.

It's an early draft so any constructive criticism is welcome.

===

Halo 3:

If I were to describe Halo 3 in a sentence or two I would describe it as such.

Halo 3 is essentially an arena for two bandwagons. Two giant bandwagons, full to the brim with filthy, screeching monkeys. Each of these monkeys (there are about 3 million per bandwagon) has a big pile of steaming shit in it's hand, and each time the bandwagons pass each other the monkeys will attempt to hurl their shit at the opposing team of monkeys in an attempt to... well I don't know. But that's what Halo 3 is. Projectile shit jousting.

Reviews for Halo 3 tend to fluctuate wildly between those that claim it was actually handed down to man on stone tablets at the top of a mountain during a particularly awesome dragonforce-guitar-soloesque thunderstorm to those that decry it as 'average' but with the the same expression and tone of voice one might use while muttering the words "Child rape"

"But Doctorpus!" I hear you cry, "surely neither opinion can be right because if the game was in fact the greatest achievement man can lay claim to surely everyone would love it and if it was so terrible surely no one would buy it"

Ah logic. Eat shit. A million flies can't be wrong.

But I digress. Halo 3 is just a game. It isn't the sign of the end times for first person shooters nor is it a divine artifact bestowed upon us by an all loving god, it's a decent fps and the only supernatural power it can lay claim to is the fact it can be used to sell absolutely fucking anything (Gamefuel, Jesus)

Now now. Before you start grabbing another handful of your own feces. Just hear me out.

First, my credentials. I'm a PC gamer at heart. I have a LAN network set up in my living room, which I know isn't the great geek achievement it used to be since routers, ethernet cables and indeed entire fucking computers cost less than a tank of gas lately, but I digress. My pc cost more than my car, i have a mouse that cost me nearly $100. I'm not h4rdcore by any means but I'm a few steps up from those people who use flattened frostie boxes as mouse pads.
You'll never convince me that there's a better way to play a good FPS, RTS or 3rd person shooter than the good old mouse and keyboard combo. At least until they invent something that let's me control Godron Freeman with my eyebrows.
So when I say I'm 'fairly fond' of Halo 3, it's not because I don't have anything to compare it to.

So In Halo 3. You play the oddly named Master Chief. Which I'm told is an actual rank in the U.S navy (because in the future Mankind will be synonymous with the U.S.A of course) but then again, it's actually unclear as to whether it's his rank or his actual name. I would go into detail but this opens up a whole new can of worms (Is Duke Nukem and actual duke? Does he own a title and lands?)
I could go into a lot of detail about the Halo 3 universe because there is a whole lot of detail there with the books and the comic books and the branded neckties and all but that would be kind of missing the point. What the big marketing furor and fucking awful novels missed about the story of the Halo games is that the whole thing is totally retarded. In a funny way.

I mean let me summarize it for you.

Mankind finally reaches the stars. Mankind is attacked by unstoppable and slightly religious (fucking catholic) aliens. Mankind is on the verge of extinction. Only one experimental warrior can save us all. Yes. You're playing the on-land equivalent of fucking R-TYPE except instead of weird alien sprites you're fighting midgets and lizards and instead of collecting powerups you twat monkeys in the face and teabag them, Superb.
And that's just it. Yes there's a big bullshit backstory about sentient A.I's and other such crud but the whole story of Halo comes down to one single point. You are arch typical space marine hero, they are arch typical aliens, go fuck them up.

So with that, and with your obligatory starting pistol in hand, you proceed to fuck up a lot of aliens. Eventually you fuck up so many you run out, and thus have to buy the next game and the one after that.

So Halo 3 opens with Master Chief falling to earth as a green freezepop meteor. By this point I'd completely forgotten what happened in the last game (aside from the fact the ending was complete bullshit) so I'm pretty sure they put that in just to show you how awesome Master Chief is. Perhaps they should have done it in slow motion.

So Master chief is woken up by two more walking clinches (seeing a pattern?). Namely, expendable black guy and obligatory good guy alien and yadda yadda yadda. Time to shoot some stuff.

 

[Aries_Split]

I love you.

 

[PurpleRain]

Perhaps the language could be toned down a bit. Swearing is as good as the context you use it in. Over using cuss words, is like over using any word.

 

[The Wooster]

Yeah. I tend to try and squeeze a little too much out of my limited vocabulary. When I'm done I'll edit and remove a lot of the foul language. Not all of it though. I'm fond of foul language.

 

[Drong]

so far so good and intersted to see how far you can take this and if you are really going to manage to stay impartial and how long it will be till either the pro or anti halo camp or both for that matter come round your house and remove your teste's with a rusty bread knife. Still keep writing and good luck (and make sure you have sturdy doors and good locks)

 

[Ultrajoe]

haha... mokeys....

i like this man.

 

[Apone]

I'd agree with Rain and Drong. Good work so far, keep it up but keep the language for when you need some punch.

 

[stompy]

Off to a good start... though you still have a fair ways to go. I look forward to seeing the finished product.

Be warned though: Halo reviews aren't really liked on The Escapist.

 

[The Wooster]

So I'm going to start with the single player, which by most accounts is the shittiest/least divine part of Halo 3.

Now Single player is a bit of a misleading moniker. I mean, yes, you could play it by yourself, if for example you have no friends but the single player campaign (see there it is again) is a lot better with an extra person. Not four people though. With four Master Chief's (or in this case One Master Chief, one alien and two of the halo equivalent of the red shirts from star trek) the whole thing descends into a mad sprint to see who gets to shoot the aliens first and the whole game ends up lasting about 4 hours.

Ok so you and your buddy (or in my case, my girlfriend's child because I don't have to feel bad about barking orders at him and calling him retarded when he won't give me his sniper rifle) start off in the jungle and the first thing you'll notice is that the game doesn't look half bad (actually the first thing you might notice if you just happen to be mentally fucking ill is that the game runs in slightly less than full HD resolution. But to be honest. If the first thing you did upon starting the game was count the pixels on your monitor then perhaps you'd have more fun staring at blades of grass). After playing Crysis on the pc in full "I can see the god damn sweat on this ladybug's balls"-o-vision, the jungle seems a little sterile and cartoonish. Then again the pc required to run Crysis in that mode cost about as much as it would to buy three 360's and duct tape them together so it's kind of an unfair comparison.
So Halo 3 looks pretty good. You may notice the colours. Yeah you haven't seen those in a while have you? Sure the buzzing of the 'why are all the games brown' choir is growing increasingly tired but let's be honest, those whining little shits do actually have a point. Games are getting more and more realistic and somewhere, someone, with a good (or bad) sense of humour realized that 'realistically' life is a dull, washed out and very much shit like, so he made his game to match. And Gears of War was born.
So Halo 3 is fairly colourful, although sometimes too colourful as some of the alien guns look like particularly imaginative raver sex toys. The environments vary between the usual deserts and arctic areas and other environments that are nice and easy to render. Vibrancy comes at the cost of realism in this case though. Yes Master Chief's armour is cool in concept but I don't really see the benefit of painting it lime green and giving him a visor made out of the same stuff they make those annoying golden skiing goggles out of doesn't seem like the best idea when it comes to concealment.
The aliens are neatly colour coded. The lizard aliens (the ones that rip of the predator) are almost all dressed in blue and they drive the vehicular equivalent of ultramarine IPODs, all shiny plastic and flashing lights. The monkey aliens (the ones that rip off the planet of the apes) wear armour so god damn shiny it makes them look like extras in an 80's pop music video, and they drive motorcycles. Hover motorcycles. Also as an added bonus when you shoot them enough their armour pops off like they're in a version of halo ghosts n' goblins. Quality.
The textures are nice and clean, the bump mapping is a little more understated (no more Halo 2 "Oh my god I have thousands of cancerous tumors under my skin!") but the design is still nondescript with the human Marines looking like a straight up rip off of another bunch of marines who also happened to end up fighting an evil flood of aliens that bred in the bodies of their victims.
Changing the setting to earth has also lent a little bit more feasibility to the level design. No more giant concrete stretches and minamilist spires, the modelers had to actually work on this one. Don't worry though, towards the end of the game when Master Chief makes his inevitable return to Halo (super mega halo) the good old abstract quake 3 arena esque buildings make a return with a vengeance.

 

[Leon P]

Bashing a game because its not to your taste is just 'rubbish'

this isn't really a review, is it? its a self congratulatory
I think halo 3 is teh gay rant.

Youve only posted this because your pretty much sure 99%
of the escapist will agree with you. and you know there whole opinions come from watching to much Zero punc.

 

[Fire Daemon]

Not much of a review, more of a rant.

 

[wilsonscrazybed]

Sorry folks, I did some thread clean-up, there was a certain individual who thought he might cause some damage by posting incoherent attacks on the users here. His posts were removed, some of the responses too, I am sorry if this caused any confusion. Let's pretend that user's outburst never happened.

 

[qbert4ever]

Although you seem to have a thing for feces (what websites do YOU look at?), I like it. Ignore the haters, and finish it up.

 

[The Wooster]

Bashing a game because its not to your taste is just 'rubbish'

this isn't really a review, is it? its a self congratulatory
I think halo 3 is teh gay rant.

Youve only posted this because your pretty much sure 99%
of the escapist will agree with you. and you know there whole opinions come from watching to much Zero punc.

Try reading it, You know, with your eyes, and you might realise I'm actually pretty fond of Halo 3.

 

[The Wooster]

So how does it play? As someone who plays a whole boatload of counterstrike a game built entirely around accuracy and being a shithead, Halo 3 is a relatively refreshing change. With the exception of maybe two or three weapons (the sniper rifle, the battle rifle and the pistol) the game lets you get away with a shocking amount of inaccuracy. Simply spraying smaller enemies with your assault rifle often nets you kills and burst firing is only really needed at more extreme ranges. Thanks to the games now pandemic health system, the good old, 'Hide behind a rock while the deus ex machina machine warms up', you rarely get punished for making mistakes even on legendary. If rushing from the front resulted in you getting your ass perforated with shiny mood crystals you can often make it back to cover, wait a few seconds and try a different approach, something that wouldn't be possible with a classic health bar.
Throwing grenades is a joy too, always has been, deciding to map them to a single button rather than a weapon slot was a small stroke of genius which adds a lot more to you're tactical repertoire. Sure they added a couple of pointless new grenades, the spike grenade essentially being a less useful version of the plasma grenade and the incendiary grenade which I used about twice.
You might notice that a lot of the things I'm saying Halo 3 got right are things that the Halo series has got right in general. That's true, Bungie hasn't changed much between the two games and it kind of shows. Every now and again when you rush a brute, peppering him with assault rifle rounds and then finish the job by twatting him in the mouth like you're trying to score a home run will give you a brief sensation of deja vu. "Like haven't I done this before? Like a billion times?"
The question is, whether things really needed to be changed. Now don't get me wrong, I think sequels should shake things up a little (One thing they should not do however, is introduce time travel. More on this at a later date) and I think EA's treatment of the Madden and Fifa franchises are fantastic how to's on 'How not to make a sequel' but as the producers of Spiderman 3 said "With great revenue comes a great responsibility not to change the formula" then they said "fuck it" and added a scene where Peter Parker moonwalks down the highstreet which is probably a bad example. So Halo 3 doesn't take any risks. And you'll all hate me for saying that because it's one of those criticisms the intellectual gamer crowd uses which is completely irrefutable because they can just pull any concept out of their collective asses and say Bungie chickened out for not including it.
"Halo 3 takes no risks, a surfing/shark battling minigame would have really set the game off"
"Halo 3 plays it safe. Perhaps we can see some more commentary on Darfur in your future games. Eh Bungie? You useless cretins"
Repeat ad nasueum.
So while I don't want to see Master Chief waxing lyrical about the holocaust or rolling every item in the universe into a giant ball to please his demanding and possibly sexually abusive father, I do want to see, you know, something.
So lets talk about Halo in general for a second here. Let's talk about what they got right. The levels are expansive and great for booming around on in it's nicely done vehicles, but get out and wander around on foot for a while and you'll realize they seem a little sterile. Especially when compared (yet a-fucking gain) to Crysis or something like say 'Oblivion'. While you do a lot of walking, you never really get the feeling you're moving around the world in a real way. You never get that 'Holy fuck I just climbed a god damn mountain' feeling, i always felt like I was simply moving from one valley to another. That being said, the levels lend themselves well to pitched or vehicular battles and they generally serve their purpose quite well.
The Halo engine deserves it's praise too. I've yet to play a game with the exception of the battlefield series that makes the vehicles are viable part of the gaming environment. The physics system gives the vehicles weight and momentum, but really it's your ability to hop in and out of them at will, and use them for say, cover, or building a giant tower so you can jump out through the level's skybox, that makes them so much fun.
Tossing grenades is a joy, again because of the physics system, that allows you to calculate where they're going to go with a certain degree of accuracy.
Oh and hitting things with you gun was an awesome idea.

Halo 3, like halo 2, gets all of this right. It'd be hard not to. But what does 3 add to the series that 2 didn't? Simple. Fine tuning and bullshit.
The A.I in 3 is worth a little bit of praise. It's not quite up to F.E.A.R standards (then again fear had such good AI because it only had about 3 types of enemies, two of which just ran towards you and tried to smack you in the chin) but the covenant take cover, dive away from grenades, push forwards when you're hiding like a little ***** in legendary mode and most importantly, very rarely do anything retarded to break the immersion. Unfortunately not very many people will get to witness these feats of AI craftsmanship because Bungie decided that as well as having less health, armour and shittier weapons, they should also have less brains too, so in any mode below heroic the covenenat act like they've made frontal lobotomies standard issue. The AI won't move forward, nor will it retreat under fire, they'll never use the new special items nor try and flank you. It's a depressing thought that the only way for your standard gamer, which is a slovenly creature, to witness some of the game's better A.I is to put up with insta kill snipers and plasma grenade tosses that border on the ridiculous.
Now difficulty is a little bit of an issue. As I said, bog standard mode, is way to easy and coupled with the generous auto save system the game essentially becomes a tour through a shooting gallery, especially if you've press ganged one of your friends into playing with you. Heroic is just on the too easy side of 'just right' for me and Legendary, although definitely the most fun to play will most likely cause a few headaches in particularly frustrating sections, especially when snipers are involved. So in essence, it's kind of like Goldilocks and the three bears except when the bed's too easy the bear turns out to be a submissive and gets Goldilocks to beat him with a ping pong paddle and when it's too big the bear kills Goldilocks and rapes her corpse.
What's aggravating though is that there is a way to switch up the difficulty in a way you'd like. Namely through the skulls. Anything I said about two players being too easy is instantly rendered void by say, the iron skull, which ensures that you learn to really loathe your partner by resetting both of you to the same checkpoint when the useless bastard gets tagged by a plasma grenade. Again. There's a fair amount of these skulls, some of which are relatively easy to come across whilst others require, fuck, I don't even know how you're supposed to figure out that second to last skull, I looked it up on the internet. That's a problem though. Because the game would have been a lot better the first time through if you could have enabled some of these skulls from the start. Indeed it's like any game that requires you to beat it once to unlock hard mode. A move kind of on par with ensuring the player has to complete level 3 before he unlocks the use of the left analogue stick. Stop doing this.

 

[The Wooster]

To the mods. Sorry. I didn't want to play devil's advocate here although I knew there'd be a little bit of tussle from the rabid pro or anti Halo camps. I'm honestly trying to strike a balance between the two.

As for the piece, as you can see as I get further in I lose the track a little. Probably because I write without notes or a plan, i just plonk myself in front of my tv and start churning out words in Jarte. I'll get to refining it soon and adding content that isn't just summarizing the game's weakness and faults and actually says something interesting about the game.

 

[The Wooster]

As I'll make clearer as I edit I don't think you can review Halo 3 without going into the Halo series a whole as not very much as changed from one game to the next. The bit about what kind of gamer I am is important as well because a: I am an egotist and b: Perspective is very important. What are we comparing Halo 3 to here exactly? I mean compared to most console shooters, yeah, Halo 3 is pretty good. Compared to Half life 2 on pc? Not so much.

I agree some of the vulgarity comes off as a bit forced. Again they're generally just ideas I work into more polished gems of bile as I edit but some of them will be cut completely. The goldilocks paragraph in particular seems very tacked on as I read through it.

Also I do plan at the end of the piece to say whether or not I recomend Halo and why, which in my opnion makes it a review.

Thank you for the feedback though. I will keep it in mind as I edit.

Oh and can anyone pm me instructions on how to add little article style pictures like there are in 'A review of Alone in the dark by someone old enough to have played the original' that would be awesome.