Negative Gamer Review: Halo 3: ODST
Toto, I’ve a feeling we’re not in Master Chief any more. We must be over the rainbow! At least, that’s the only explanation I can see for all these bright colours. We are indeed not in MC any more, possibly a good thing as he was starting to smell. ODST may take the Halo 3 name, and nearly all of the weapons, enemies, objects and inability to tell a story, but it has managed to add something a little bit extra. Something that really does make it feel like a different, if subtly different, experience; more bloom and hiding.
In OSDT you walk around a bit of a city looking for clues as to where all your cliché space marine buddies are. Dotted around the place are objects, which when interacted with take us into the eyes of said cliché space marine buddies and into a level of Halo.
The game also comes shipped with a new, survival based multiplayer mode; Firefight. The goal here is to survive through as many waves of increasingly difficult enemies as possible. You also get a second disc with a copy of the original Halo 3 multiplayer, only bundled with all the DLC you couldn’t be bothered to pay for.
Quite a lot of hubbub about this one.
ODST is a few passable levels of Halo broken up by an annoying, boring, dull and frustrating ‘œhub’ world trying to pad out time and give you a false sense of non-linearity. The game plays a lot like a swiss-roll, a cheap swiss-roll: All you really want is the cream and jam, but you have to bite through a disproportionate amount of filler sponge cake to get at it. Sure it keeps the chosen structure of the desert or snack and it differentiates itself from just a bit of cream and jam on its own, but it’s still unnecessary.
The game was not designed with the hub world in mind and it feels very tacked on. Almost all of the city areas look the same and are copies of areas you play though in the real levels. It’s also just not fun. Not least because it’s a full in-game kilometre from end to end, and unless you’re lucky, you won’t find a vehicle. There’s also an annoying frequency of having no ammo and bumping into some bad-ass enemies. Running away does not make me feel cool.
Another oddity of the hub world is that it seems to emphasize the point ‘œyou can go anywhere and do the levels in any order’. Which is fine, it’s just the levels are designed very strictly linear. Each level takes you to a fixed time after you and your BFFs got separated. This would be fine if each level was a different character’s story, but they all interweave and one leads to another. I missed out the (chronologically) first couple of levels and was left very confused about why people were there, and doing what they did. Either make one level lead to the next, or make it not matter what order you do them in. As it is, it fails unless you follow the obvious route.
Hurf durf I play Halo.
Perhaps I just haven’t been playing very many mainstream games, or perhaps I just don’t pay enough attention, but the characters in ODST are horrid. Shallow, vapid, the lines people talk only come in three forms; burly space marine dick, attempted emotion with failed subtly on par with a teen drama or generic in-game shouts of advice. Within the first 60 seconds I knew everything that I needed to know; I dislike them all. With no twists or surprises along the way, it’s all utterly forgettable. But perhaps that’s just the Halo way.
Still, it gets the job done. And that job is to provide an attempt at plot in an incredibly short game. After completing half a dozen levels I was surprised to find I was near the end of the entire campaign. It is a very short game, far too short. For me it would have to be at least 50% longer to justify the ‘œfull game’ tag, even with the added multiplayer mode.
Which brings me nicely to Firefight, ODST‘s multiplayer offering. To be fair to the game, it comes with a second disc loaded with Halo 3 multiplayer, but it’s Halo 3 multiplayer. The only time I’ve talked about this in a good light was when a friend who’s not played Halo 3 wanted to know what it’s about, and another friend offered to sell their second disc. If you don’t have any DLC for Halo 3, you’re not going to be interested enough in the multiplayer to need this. If you do have all or most of the DLC, it just won’t be worth it.
Firefight is a mode I could see myself actually enjoying for much longer if I weren’t renting my copy of ODST. You just need to survive, killing off waves of enemies which slowly increases in difficulty. There’s one pool of lives the whole team use. As long as somebody makes it to the end of a wave, if you’ve run out of lives fallen comrades can re-spawn. The way the pacing is set up you can literally be playing this mode for hours. There are a lot of waves. As one wave won’t arrive until the previous one is cleared, things alternate between hectic (when reinforcements first turn up) to almost relaxed (when you’re mopping up the last of them).
Best of all, do well enough and you get some achievements! You know you love them, and ODST knows this too. Even in campaign, for example: whenever you get a kill with the Needler you’re reminded with an on-screen prompt how many more kills to your Pink Mist achievement. Everything seems geared around points and ePeen, rather than telling a story, which fits with my previous criticism over the characters. It’s all just shallow extra to the core, solid, gameplay that’s made extra rewarding with the help of a few points to your Gamerscore.
A few other points worth mentioning:
- Before we even start the game we are greeted with a reminder to download DLC in the form of a full screen pop-up advert. Right now it’s a free video doc, but going off Bungie’s track record, this wont last.
- Autosave? Pff, that’s retro. In ODST unless you actively save & exit, your progress isn’t saved. Checkpoints are only used for when you die.
- There is jazz in the hub world. I like the jazz, but it doesn’t half feel out of place.
- The in-game map is crap. It’s hard to tell without much study what’s a barrier and what’s just a bridge. To help plot a route you can add a way point. That’s one, single way point. It’s basically useless. Worse; because the city all looks the same you need to be referencing the map every few meters but it doesn’t pause the game, being all ‘œimmersive’ or something. This is just annoying.
- The bloom hurts my eyes. The game alternates between dark and light too much. You’re given a fancy mode in your HUD that outlines stuff, but also seems to turn the bloom to 11. God help your eyes if you accidentally turn around into one of the many brightly illuminated door ways with this on.
ODST is a solid game, but it’s not a full game. It’s several short but polished classic Halo levels with a hub world wedged in the middle. Maybe it’s to give you time to think, to contemplate your actions, but this is Halo, so that can’t be right. Play it with friends or play it for achievements and you’ll be happy.
You should play this game if’¦
..you have the spare cash and are looking for some more, quality Halo time.
Final Score
Different enough to feel fresh, but still carrying a lot of Halo 3 baggage. No surprises make this game very average.
Images: Source
I’m curious as to how much you think the game is actually worth. It’s length doesn’t appear to justify the full £40, so would £30 be more appropriate? Would a lower price point have affected your review score?
I’m tempted to pick this up in a while, pre-owned.
@TheGyro: I wouldn’t pay more than £20, hence why I rented it for £6 :)
As someone who skipped on Halo 3, I’m actually loving the game. Especially liking being able to get into Halo 3 MP finally. :)
Maybe it’s just the emotional, artistic effect that the game is having on me, but I’m really getting into the image of a lone soldier exploring the hub, always wondering if that next battle could/should be avoided. Mind you I LOVE the image of being alone in a city at night in less than ideal weather, with some soft/sad jazz playing, so I might be a little biased. ^_^
what i find offputting in halo the most: the enemies are not fearsome. I always have the feeling of bashing some members of an intergalactic pride parade, and not some relentless violent invader.
@NoZart: You know, I had never thought of that, but it’s absolutely true. The series has never really done anything to make us fear or hate the Covenant. A few cutscenes or something emphasizing their brutality would go a long way.
That said, I actually liked ODST. The campaign was definitely shorter than I would like and I wasn’t really a fan of the hub either, but the actual missions were great. Also Firefight is probably the best example of that game mode that I’ve seen. I love that it isn’t one life and you’re out; you actually get a chance to fight it out and survive for a bit before the difficulty ramps up. Of course, I’ve loved the series since the first installment, so you have to take what I say with a grain of salt.
Also, random note, after you find a few pieces of Sadie’s story, supply caches unlock across the city and a few of them have Mongooses that you can use to drive around. So you don’t always have to walk through the city.
@Glassninja: They do try to “glass” the Earth. I think that’s pretty violent. Bungie’s done a terrible job of putting emotional weight into the any of the game’s actions. Every location you fight on is populated with enemies and sometimes friendly NPCs. I hope they have the capabilities with Halo: Reach to do something more dramatic with their games. As it stands each Halo title makes you feel like you’re playing a game with no weight to your actions.
@player66: Truth, but it still seems very impersonal. I was envisioning more of like a brute chieftain taking out some aggression on a prisoner or a civilian or the like. Yeah glassing a planet is a larger scale deal, but you don’t see it affecting individual people or affecting you the player on an emotional level (Which I agree is something this game fails hard at).
@Glassninja: Without getting into spoiler territory, there is a little of this in ODST, but it’s not brutality against civilians. It’s hilarious to hear the audio logs from the city when you view cutscenes and flashbacks when the city looks like a ghost town. Damn that sucks.
Sorry, got a bit confused there. Audio logs… where you hear panic and bedlam in the city…but nothing of the sort in-game or via cinematics.
You sir, are a master of words. I don’t know many other writers of a site based around a negative view of the gaming media and public in general who could do that.
Swiss roll analogies should be used more often. :D