Weapons and Multiplayer
The 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 at 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. Here's the even-cooler part: You can mod solo, or network in a group of friends.
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 250MB 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 play as the Arbiter only 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 devices 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
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