So this Halo 3 thing all the kids are banging on about? Got it Friday (due to having the best girlfriend ever) and beat it last night. But then, with eight to ten hours of rather linear “if it moves and doesn’t sound like Nathan Fillion or Adam Baldwin, shoot it” gameplay, that’s to be expected. Thoughts and criminally long paragraphs after the jump to avoid spoilers and such.

First things first: Halo 3 has one of the most fantastic end game sequences I’ve ever played. Never mind that it will be instantly familiar if you finished the original game (or Super Metroid, Resident Evil 4, or any other “the place is coming down and we gotta motor” game endings). If it did nothing else right, the Halo series would still deserve heaps and mounds of praise for the way in which its gameplay lends itself to truly epic – dare I say, emergent? – cinematic moments. Bounding over the crumbling bits of the Halo ring as it prepares to fire, explosions ripping up the newborn landscape around me as mad, doomed zombies (space zombies, mind) try their damnedest to take me down with them…it’s a wonderful end to a series that, for all its faults, never really relied on bosses for its defining moments (and when it did usually made sure you didn’t really think of them as such – enemies that could be called bosses were just another event, the next cool thing in a long line of them being tossed your way in need of blowing up). It’s going to be a good long while before I forget the feeling of my breath seizing up in my throat as a piece of paneling exploded in front of me, forcing my Warthog into a sharp turn that sent its ass end fish-tailing out over nothingness. The way the thing just hung there, teetering on the brink before the front wheels could gain enough grip to pull us up was sheer beauty. Halo 3 is full of such accidental glories, form taking down a Covenant Hunter with a well-placed grenade mere seconds before he pounded me to pulp and being complemented by an AI-controlled ally to Gravity Hammering my way to victory across a heavily occupied bridge, sending tiny Grunts airborne like I was playing the newest and heavily fascist-leaning Tiger Woods game. And then there’s the intentional moments, dropped into the game with palpable glee by the developers – the fight against not one but two towering Covenant Scarabs with the vehicle of your choosing, the opportunity to save a fellow human from a scripted choking by putting a bullet through his captor’s skull, and a dozen more I can’t quite pick out at the moment. Bungie pioneered the idea of focusing battles and the like into “thirty seconds of fun” in the first Halo, and there are a number of bits here that definitely show they still know how to hit the right buttons.

That said, there’s a key phrase in the above paragraph that I find myself repeating a lot when talking about the game: “Despite all its faults”. And don’t let the universal praise and high scores fool you, Halo 3 certainly has them. Putting aside the tatters of story the game gives you (and then completely abandons when it needs to take you elsewhere for the sake of stretching out the solo campaign’s play time), there’s just far too much here that feels like it was lifted from both of the previous Halo games. As with its predecessors, Bungie’s knack for level design starts strong and engaging, creating an opening that’s both educational to new players while remaining challenging for veterans. The deeper you get though, the fresh feeling of this new world starts to fall away before utterly crumbling in the game’s first encounter with indoor levels. From your first step in the human base, anything with hallways and corridors becomes repetitive to the point of being confusing, with far too many rooms only distinguishable from where you just were by the number of dead bodies. After that, I found myself calling levels based on my experience with the first Halo – This next bit will have me in a Warthog. After this, I’ll need to knock out some sort of shield, and then probably fight a tank or something. Some parts of the game are genuinely too dangerous to think too hard about, as doing so might start the cynical part of your brain complaining about how you already played this bit years ago.

And then there are the enemies. The Covenant Elites you spent the first two games gleefully killing are now your allies, and have been replaced by the massive berserker-prone Brutes. This actually changes nothing; while a Brute soaks up more damage than an Elite, they’re also dumber and easier to hit, relying too heavily on special equipment like the new Bubble Shield while hardly ever seeking true cover. It made me long for the more intelligent foes of old, the sort who, as far back as the first game, would use interconnecting corridors to their advantage by trying to flank me rather than waiting around to be shot.

And then there’s the Flood, the zombie menace du jour of the Halo universe since the first one. Tough, fast, seemingly every where at once and able to revive any of their members you kill, the Flood work once, maybe twice as a scary force. With that largely used up in the first game (aside from their arrival in Halo 3, where their crash-landing on Earth leaves the landscape blackened and cracked and the air filled with smoke), they become little more than a nuisance, a constant wave of things to pump bullets into and be killed by until you realize your best hope is to just run. I only stood my ground with the Flood when the game absolutely demanded it; for 99% of my encounters I either ran through them, ran away from them, or let the computer-controlled Arbiter hander the worst of it. They just aren’t worth the ammo, as even at the lower difficulty levels – I was playing at Normal, for what it’s worht – the game is just gong to keep throwing up new monsters to replace the ones you’ve killed. Their appearance in Halo 3 – particularly during your trip into the bowels of one of their ships to rescue your AI gal pal and general Miss Sassypants Cortana – speaks to falling down of imagination; the Flood were originally the answer to “What’s tougher for the player to face than the Covenant”?, and for a while that was fine. The trouble is that two sequels and six years later Bungie are still falling back on the same answer, and it isn’t good enough any more.

The Covenant are worthy opponents – even when led by the Brutes they use offensive maneuvers, defensive shields and specialized weaponry, and have taught more than a few players new ways of looking at their arsenal in regards to how it can be used. Compared to that, the Flood are little more than mindless target dummies, initially impressive due to their sheer numbers and brutality, but ultimately just an irritation to be pushed aside. They reduce all but the most determined and skilled player strategies to just running through a crowd; from “how can I work around that turret position to get a clear shot?” to “well, if I equip something heavy and deadly, run in a straight line, and focus on hitting any bastard that gets in my way, maybe I can push through this bit to the next fun part”. Only there shouldn’t be a next fun part, there should be this fun part, followed by another, and another, and another. It’s all the more frustrating because up until the Flood arrive in all their cut scene glory, that’s by and large Halo 3: big dumb fun that challenges you in ways you don’t expect but never punishes a lack of skill until you ask it to. Derivative? Extremely, and for all the wonders of its massive multiplayer options, even that looks decidedly last-gen when compared to something like, say, Valve’s forthcoming Team Fortress 2. But despite that and all my complaining, Halo 3 is a solid, engaging (and let’s not forget beautiful) game that is a hell of a lot of fun. It does what all great games should do: keeps me engaged in the moment while excited over whatever’s just around the corner. Even more than that that, it makes me excited for whatever’s next for Bungie as a company. Especially if it’s something that comes without the nagging feeling that they’ve run out of ideas.

Filed under: Game Reviews