Halo 3 is ridiculous and fun.
Let me emphasize right now that when I say that, I do not mean "ridiculously fun". I mean, the game itself is RIDICULOUS, and the basic gameplay of "shoot everything that moves" is fun. Unfortunately, the former drowns the latter out in a bucket of its own filth and makes the fun seem contrived, trite, and utterly pointless.
Halo 3 is pretty much the most popular game of the past...year, and if you liked previous Halos, you likely already own this game, so this review likely will mean very little to you, but to those ten people who still haven't bought this game, let me tell you right now that, unless you are able to engage in wildly fantastic multiplayer bouts with all of your multitudes of friends, this game has NOTHING to offer you.
Single Player is a joke and a half, designed as a love letter to...itself. The game oozes unwarranted arrogance, which is most obscenely summed up in a little letter that Bungie writes us in the end credits thanking us for helping them in their goal of world domination, which would be funny except that I sort of had the feeling that Halo 3 had punched me solidly in the nuts with steel knuckles for the past two hours, so I wasn't feeling inclined to shower laughter and adoration onto the fucktards who had tried to pass off this cheap entertainment as something even remotely "average".
I love Halo, and I love Halo 2--even with its shitty ending, I found the package satisfying because it's long, varied, and can offer a variety of different challenges to keep you on your toes the whole way through. It's easy, but not THAT easy--and of course, Legendary is basically so hard that the game ceases to be fun and starts to be a terrible, terrible chore. That is how Halo worked, and it was fine because between Halo 1 and Halo 2 they added enough new things to keep the stale formula looking fresh. Halo 3, however, offers little new besides a few new guns, a few new vehicles which are basically alien clones of previous vehicles, and a new emphasis on the "plot"--something that has been, while prevalent, never a full focus of the game.
That has been a very good thing, because when Bungie decides to make something plot-driven and epic, they proceed to make utter ASSES of themselves. The storyline is a series of overwrought, melodramatic monotonies that drive the plot forward with all the subtlety of a crochet mallet. Every line of dialogue is unintentionally funny, because the writing is so terribly BAD that it only serves to drive into sharp relief how utterly IDIOTIC the plot is. The entire storyline is a back and forth, with the entire first half of the game repeating the exact same scenes just with different characters over and over and over and over again, and after THAT, the game's plot just turns to focus on the tragic romance between Master Chief and the robot girl who lives in his head.
Bungie basically opened up the "big book of cliches" and rammed them into the game with a forklift. It's so bad that, after awhile, the plot ceases to be important at all, despite its attempts to the contrary, and you are basically just biding time till you kill things again--and, in that respect, this game features the six same enemies over and over and over again. Sure, the other Halo games are guilty of this too, but this one is really bad because you don't every actually fight the series' famous Elites, the Master Chief clones who served as the ultimate and definitive enemy of the other games. They were smart, strategic, well-protected and oftentimes were capable of using a variety of strategies for any given situation, making them terribly dangerous enemies to face.
They are gone, the events of which are nicely explained in Halo 2, and they are instead replaced full on with the Brutes, who are NOT the same thing, because the Brutes come in two flavors--stupid and STUPIDER. There's one type of Brute that shoots you and another that is slightly tougher and either shoots you or wails on you with a giant Hammer, and both of them can be beaten in exactly the same way, every time, ANY TIME, and it gets very, very old very very quickly.
The Flood, which are oftentimes played up as the series' TRUE villains, are played up here with a bunch of new abilities, crafty forms, and shape-shifting that ultimately proves useless because you fight the Flood in maybe FOUR missions, and in only two of those are they the actual focus of gameplay.
Speaking of missions, the missions in this game are very short--compared to the monstrous missions of Halo 1 and the pseudo monstrous missions of Halo 2, this is rather surprising, and it would be a welcome change of pace except that by the time you are really enjoying killing the same enemies over and over again, the game decides to abruptly END. The game is short--so short in fact that I purchased the game yesterday and was able to beat it AND throw in about twelve Deathmatches in exactly twenty four hours, as well as beat a mission on Heroic in co-op. The game's short length leaves you feeling cheated, especially with the game's slavish obsession with making itself look and feel "epic". Where I wanted a grand and glorious conclusion to the Halo trilogy--the most explosive of them all, combining everything the series had done right--I instead got this half-baked expansion pack whose true enjoyment can likely only be gotten by playing it and Halo 2 in conjunction, because they are pretty much the EXACT SAME GAME.
I've ranted here, I know, but it should be said that this is the first time a Halo game has ever been abyssmally AVERAGE to me--and not only that, this game has also shown just how fragile the delicate balance between fun and repetition that the other games have tightwalked so far really is.
Rent this game if you don't already own it, or else just play a friend's. It's just not worth it.
Let me emphasize right now that when I say that, I do not mean "ridiculously fun". I mean, the game itself is RIDICULOUS, and the basic gameplay of "shoot everything that moves" is fun. Unfortunately, the former drowns the latter out in a bucket of its own filth and makes the fun seem contrived, trite, and utterly pointless.
Halo 3 is pretty much the most popular game of the past...year, and if you liked previous Halos, you likely already own this game, so this review likely will mean very little to you, but to those ten people who still haven't bought this game, let me tell you right now that, unless you are able to engage in wildly fantastic multiplayer bouts with all of your multitudes of friends, this game has NOTHING to offer you.
Single Player is a joke and a half, designed as a love letter to...itself. The game oozes unwarranted arrogance, which is most obscenely summed up in a little letter that Bungie writes us in the end credits thanking us for helping them in their goal of world domination, which would be funny except that I sort of had the feeling that Halo 3 had punched me solidly in the nuts with steel knuckles for the past two hours, so I wasn't feeling inclined to shower laughter and adoration onto the fucktards who had tried to pass off this cheap entertainment as something even remotely "average".
I love Halo, and I love Halo 2--even with its shitty ending, I found the package satisfying because it's long, varied, and can offer a variety of different challenges to keep you on your toes the whole way through. It's easy, but not THAT easy--and of course, Legendary is basically so hard that the game ceases to be fun and starts to be a terrible, terrible chore. That is how Halo worked, and it was fine because between Halo 1 and Halo 2 they added enough new things to keep the stale formula looking fresh. Halo 3, however, offers little new besides a few new guns, a few new vehicles which are basically alien clones of previous vehicles, and a new emphasis on the "plot"--something that has been, while prevalent, never a full focus of the game.
That has been a very good thing, because when Bungie decides to make something plot-driven and epic, they proceed to make utter ASSES of themselves. The storyline is a series of overwrought, melodramatic monotonies that drive the plot forward with all the subtlety of a crochet mallet. Every line of dialogue is unintentionally funny, because the writing is so terribly BAD that it only serves to drive into sharp relief how utterly IDIOTIC the plot is. The entire storyline is a back and forth, with the entire first half of the game repeating the exact same scenes just with different characters over and over and over and over again, and after THAT, the game's plot just turns to focus on the tragic romance between Master Chief and the robot girl who lives in his head.
Bungie basically opened up the "big book of cliches" and rammed them into the game with a forklift. It's so bad that, after awhile, the plot ceases to be important at all, despite its attempts to the contrary, and you are basically just biding time till you kill things again--and, in that respect, this game features the six same enemies over and over and over again. Sure, the other Halo games are guilty of this too, but this one is really bad because you don't every actually fight the series' famous Elites, the Master Chief clones who served as the ultimate and definitive enemy of the other games. They were smart, strategic, well-protected and oftentimes were capable of using a variety of strategies for any given situation, making them terribly dangerous enemies to face.
They are gone, the events of which are nicely explained in Halo 2, and they are instead replaced full on with the Brutes, who are NOT the same thing, because the Brutes come in two flavors--stupid and STUPIDER. There's one type of Brute that shoots you and another that is slightly tougher and either shoots you or wails on you with a giant Hammer, and both of them can be beaten in exactly the same way, every time, ANY TIME, and it gets very, very old very very quickly.
The Flood, which are oftentimes played up as the series' TRUE villains, are played up here with a bunch of new abilities, crafty forms, and shape-shifting that ultimately proves useless because you fight the Flood in maybe FOUR missions, and in only two of those are they the actual focus of gameplay.
Speaking of missions, the missions in this game are very short--compared to the monstrous missions of Halo 1 and the pseudo monstrous missions of Halo 2, this is rather surprising, and it would be a welcome change of pace except that by the time you are really enjoying killing the same enemies over and over again, the game decides to abruptly END. The game is short--so short in fact that I purchased the game yesterday and was able to beat it AND throw in about twelve Deathmatches in exactly twenty four hours, as well as beat a mission on Heroic in co-op. The game's short length leaves you feeling cheated, especially with the game's slavish obsession with making itself look and feel "epic". Where I wanted a grand and glorious conclusion to the Halo trilogy--the most explosive of them all, combining everything the series had done right--I instead got this half-baked expansion pack whose true enjoyment can likely only be gotten by playing it and Halo 2 in conjunction, because they are pretty much the EXACT SAME GAME.
I've ranted here, I know, but it should be said that this is the first time a Halo game has ever been abyssmally AVERAGE to me--and not only that, this game has also shown just how fragile the delicate balance between fun and repetition that the other games have tightwalked so far really is.
Rent this game if you don't already own it, or else just play a friend's. It's just not worth it.
