Video Game Review: Halo 3
A little game for the Xbox 360 came out early this month: Halo 3. You may have heard of it. The conclusion to Bungie’s sci-fi first-person shooter trilogy grossed an ungodly $170 million the day of its release (the highest-grossing entertainment launch ever), gave the games division at Microsoft its second profitable quarter in said division’s history, and prompted Hollywood executives to blame it for poor box office sales. But is the game worth the hysteria? While it’s a solid game and undeniably fun to play, I have to say that it’s not the video game to end all video games, even if it made more money in a single day than the GDP of several small countries.
It’s been a while since I’ve played Halo 1 and 2, but I remember two things that bothered me when I did: the story was incoherent, and the designers never included a map, making it really easy to get lost. At first I thought the level design was better in Halo 3 than its predecessors, but that was mostly because I was playing co-operatively with someone who knew where he was going. When I played a level with another newcomer to the game I had just the same old issues of “where am I going?†and “how do I get there?†Some games try to put you on rails, and some give you multiple options of where to go and what to do. Both can be fine, but I do get a little annoyed when a game only gives you one way forward and makes it hard to tell which way it is.
The storyline is almost impossible to follow, but there are a few very satisfying moments (and a few overly dramatic moments that flop). I’d have liked to see more of the alternate weapons lying around — while there were a nice variety of weapons to be had, it was rare to see more than just the basic ones. All those gripes aside, and I realize that’s a solid paragraph of complaints, Halo 3 is superbly paced. The game keeps you sucked in to the action, and there’s no real breaking point in the campaign — you just don’t want to stop. Bungie clearly focused their efforts on pumping the gameplay full of excitement, and the end result turned out quite well.
Halo 3 is an incredibly honed FPS, but it doesn’t introduce much beyond its forerunners. Graphically, it doesn’t quite reach up to the bar of Gears of War, although it has nice water effects and a physics engine that provides some spectacular moments of bloodless carnage. I’d have liked to see a more coherent storyline and better handling of objectives and mapping, but these are just blemishes. Make no mistake, Halo 3 is a great game—but it could have been an amazing game.