Halo 3
Halo 3 has a thankless task. It arrives a few weeks after the unexpectedly best-selling and epoch-teasing BioShock. It has to somehow one-up its predecessors and be the new poster child for the struggling Xbox 360. And it's saddled with a $10 million marketing campaign featuring a 1,200-square-foot Stan-Winston-made diorama and melodramatic viral videos overlaid by angsty Thomas Newman-esque piano chords that altogether promise it'll be something it's definitively not, i.e., a great, a remarkable, even—based on clips of grizzled soldiers breaking down while recollecting the game protagonist's heroism—a heartbreaking story.
This is to say nothing about how Halo 3 plays, that indeterminate element that ultimately decides whether something ought to be a game at all and not just a movie or a novel or a series of collectible bubble-gum cards. Halo aged 3-games-old is no more, no less the master of its own 6-year-old devices, ones which once again costume you as humanity's Master Chief, an armor-clad everyman culled from Greek myth, a faceless walking and once-in-a-blue-moon talking superhero we're supposed to identify with because we never get to see him (her? it?) with his helmet off. By this stage, messianic aliens have invaded the earth, a second group of body-borging aliens are threatening to eat the galaxy, and the story's MacGuffin remains the franchise namesake: A bunch of ancient bracelet-shaped orbital habitats capable of bulldozing the universe in order to "save" it.
If that sounds confusing, Halo 3 won't make it clearer or help you out if you've never played a Halo before. Suffice to say that you'll wrap up this three-game shooting spree by working your way on foot or in vehicles and occasionally by air through jungles and military installations, deserts and gutted earthly cityscapes, using guns and grenades and lots of cover to take out cadres of aliens standing around like stormtroopers just waiting for you to pass by. Your responsibilities, which alternate as you tag end zones, never grow beyond battling to flip some switch or to link up with a group of your buddies or to cast around for a level's next Big Bad. You'll use the same guns and rocket launchers and all-terrain vehicles you've been using for six years plus a few new ones, like the tiny four-wheeling two-crew Mongoose, or the Brute Hammer, a sluggish but powerful gravity-based bludgeon that's more or less the inverse of Halo 2's faster, less powerful Elite Energy Sword.
The rest of what's been updated is mostly multiplayer based, though equipment like "bubble shields," which repel projectile weapons, and self-explanatory trip mines occasionally liven up the campaign. Multiplayer itself has been completely retouched, replete with more than a dozen new maps and customizable rules you can fiddle with to get literally thousands of possible setups. In addition to a movie-making tool that lets you edit custom clips of battles, Bungie also includes a map-making "Forge" mode that lets you and some pals edit spawn points and item properties on existing maps in real time, then save them to your hard drive for future play. If you want to share any of that with random passersby, you can upload saved games, custom maps, videos and screen grabs—up to 25MB worth for free, expandable to 250MB for 750 Microsoft Points, i.e., roughly 10 bucks.
There's a moment in Halo 3 reminiscent of one in Halo 2 about midway through, where you're racing around on a beach when—just beyond a distant industrial wall—something unbelievably massive comes clambering across, four-legged and plasma-splaying and sun-blotting. Your job flitting around like a water-bug underneath is to figure out how to kneecap it, climb inside while it's down, locate and take out its control center, then get out before the whole shebang blows. At another point you're ushered away from battle to cruise silently for a few moments along a disintegrating highway. No enemies, no gunplay. You round a corner and there in the distance ... well, I don't want to spoil it, but you've heard what they say about a picture's worth.
The point being, Halo 3, like its predecessors, is about showing, not telling. It's about putting you in tactically interesting, if not altogether mind-blowing, situations and forcing you to adapt with a few grenades and a two-carry gun maximum. Its "story" unfolds as much in relation to what you make of a moment as to the dicey cutscenes bookending each of the game's nine levels. Some tank's firing roiling green plasma gobs in your direction, a couple aliens wearing jet packs are jumping in arcs and spraying you with bullets, some others across the way are snuggled into cliffs taking sniper shots, and a couple more are scrambling to flank your three and nine. The story? Make it up in body counts and offline chatter with friends about how you took out so-and-so by doing such-and-such, and never mind whatever the game's telling you about rings of death or parasitic races bent on chewing your face off. If you've played other shooters, you know this drill already, though as epic action games go, Halo 3 gets props for doing it better than most.
Part of how much better depends largely on how you play it. Less than "heroic" difficulty-wise and it trades situational replayability for a grand game of mop-up, where you can charge into areas with superpowers and little to lose (there's a reason Bungie's "heroic" descriptor reads "the way Halo's meant to be played"). "Heroic" or higher and you have a series of serious skirmishes on your hands, which, thankfully, Halo 3's classic gamepad layout and the control scheme's almost negligible auto-aim let you tackle without getting in the way.
Once you've finished the story—and even on "heroic" it's only a dozen hours, tops—Halo 3's legs lie in its hopefully trend-setting array of multiplayer options. For starters, the initial dozen-plus multiplayer maps come in all shapes and sizes, several emphasizing two-legged air time with cannons that propel you at 45-degree angles for aerial gun-jousting, others that offer flamethrowers and two-handed missile launchers you can literally rip off their base and tote around. New vehicles like the ATV Mongoose or the Covenant Chopper (a motorcycle with a buzzsaw on the front) don't really one-up your options so much as round them out, which is really what Halo 3 multiplayer is about—giving you less of more. (Call it Halo 3's subscription to the "long tail.") Even the multiplayer rules can be tweaked, so that game types like "VIP" can range from protecting your team's very-important-person to "Influential VIP," where staying near your VIP (and moving as a group) makes you physically more formidable.
With all it offers fans of shooters, solo or online, you'd be remiss to punish Halo 3 too severely for its unsurprisingly shallow single-player experience. For those who care, BioShock employs more sophisticated shooter elements and a much richer tale, but if you'd rather just wail on your gamepad's trigger against aliens or friends without worrying about the ethics of capitalism or drug abuse or killing little girls, don't be afraid to celebrate this accomplished, well-honed console-based shooter, which was never trying to be anything but.
Did you know: Writer Iain M. Banks' Culture orbitals inspired Halo's hoop-shaped cosmic habitats, while writer Larry Niven's Ringworld (which involved a ringlike habitat the size of a full Earth orbit and had a sun in the middle) is often mistaken for the game's source material. —Matt
- by Matt Peckham
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