Hardly the rip-roaring denouement to a wildly popular series, Halo 3 pales remarkably in the face of other shooters.
Of course it’s a solid shooter and of course it’s the sequel to a wildly popular cash-cow, but why all the fuss? Halo 3 introduces nothing groundbreaking and while its opening level is about as removed from Halo 1 and 2’s as you could get, it’s actual gameplay is the same staid run-and-gunning that we’ve been seeing all too frequently over the last decade. The original Halo may have popularized the recharging energy shield, but the series as a whole has done significantly less for the genre than Half-Life. This final notch on its studded belt is yet another example of the series’ firm adherence to convention – Halo 3 introduces one or two gameplay additions but there’s the prevailing sentiment that Bungie ran out of ideas after the original.
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Resultantly there’s the Halo feel but, at the same time, nothing inherently new. Even the visuals scarcely scale the technological tight-rope with muddy textures and glaringly wooden character models. Granted, the variety of locales on offer is pleasing, though Bungie runs the gamut by forcing you to repeatedly re-trace your steps through these missions. Moreover, it’s far too easy to get lost. NPC’s run off without you and bark orders from Heaven knows where. You stumble around looking for the correct door, all the while losing that sense of immersion. It’s not scripted as tight as a drum. It’s not like a Half-Life where you witness every set-piece as if it were a wonderfully engaging film. The game’s expansiveness is partly at fault; while I don’t advocate corridor-crawlers, any game that offers up freedom of movement should be replete with a mini-map. An internal GPS is not too much to ask of Master Chief, is it? And while the game occasionally plays the sympathy card and presents a directional arrow, this only prompts the question: why couldn’t it appear all the time?
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To the game’s credit the Scarab encounters are tremendously satisfying and the enemy AI displays astute tactical intuition. There are no shortage of weapons, either, though constantly being asked whether you’d like to swap Gun X for Gun Y becomes frustrating – in all honesty, I would have just liked to have been able to keep the magnum and standard assault rifle, but there seems no cohesion to the weapons loadout and you wind up filching fallen enemy’s weapons (which are of an alien variety, and far less concussive).
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Unlike the weapons, aerial fighting is in short supply. While the ability to commandeer a Hornet does make a brief appearance, it’s over far too quickly considering the sky high combat marks a nice departure from the standard run-and-gunning. It really is a pity Bungie didn’t find more ways to incorporate Master Chief’s metallic thighs inside one of these beasts, since Banshee’s and Hornet’s make a regular appearance throughout the game, just not with the seven-foot-tall gun-toting man/machine inside them. __
The pretentious operatic theme song is replete in Halo 3, as are other staple sound effects. The voice acting is acceptable, though the game’s adherence to the age-old tradition of cutscenes hardly helps matters. Really, the developers needn’t have relied on any storytelling technique considering their contrived, wafer-like plot. In all honesty, a Halo fan merely wants to shoot aliens: it's a pastime I hardly find absorbing, though the masses will beg to differ. __
As it is, you could probably glean more from the game if you played it again (that is, you’d spend less time wondering where to go next) but besides experiencing more of the scripted sequences, there’s very little else to be gained. In terms of longevity, Halo 3 survives on its well-rounded multiplayer component, though this is no surprise. It’s a lot like Pariah in some ways: a purely derivative first-person shooter. And while Halo 3 derives from its own forebear, it does so without the imagination it needed.
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Average at best, Halo 3 is a testament to the fallacies of hype and an example of our aptitude for over-excitement. Really, were it not another Halo game, it'd never have been given the time of day.