Most anyone who purchases Halo 3: ODST will have a good time, but end up wanting more, and rightfully so.
The Halo 3: ODST campaign takes place during the events of the first level of Halo 2. In the 26th century, the Covenant, an alliance of alien races bent on the destruction of humanity, has discovered the location of Earth, long hidden to them. Covenant forces are attacking the megacity of New Mombassa in Africa. All of Earth's military strength is focused on eliminating the invaders, including a five-man unit of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, the game's titular ODSTs. Through the course of the campaign, you take the role of each of the members of the ODST squad.
The game starts with a cutscene that relates the plot and sparsely establishes the characters. Your ODST squad is diverted from its mission of attacking a Covenant carrier, to instead landing in the city. This action is ordered by Captain Dare of the Office of Naval Intelligence who will also be going in with the squad. Long ago, she apparently had a relationship with the ODST team leader, Gunnery Sergeant Buck. This forms the basis of one of the game's B plots, which neither really adds or detracts from the main story. The other ODSTs have essentially no character traits defined through the course of the game aside from their names, which I'm not going to list here.
Following this brief introduction to the characters, your squad jumps into the city from orbit in small one-man pods. This sequence is enjoyable to watch, though it's nothing you haven't seen if you've played Quake 4 (or even Quake II). Graphically, ODST looks similar to Halo 3, if not slightly better. An incredible draw distance captures the feeling of fighting in a huge, futuristic city, with titanic skyscrapers towering in the background. The character models are good, and the weapons and effects look great.
Following the opening cutscene, you control the newest member of the squad, The Rookie. The Rookie is never given a name, and is referred to as "The Rookie" by the other characters in the game. The Rookie is also a mute, after the fashion of Gordon Freeman. While this worked in the Half-Life series, since you always inhabit the Freeman character, it's awkward in ODST. There are several cutscenes where, in contrast to Half-Life, you see the Rookie interacting with other characters. At one point, he even nods his head yes in response to a question. Why couldn't he have just said "Yes"? I was actually wondering if there was an in-game explanation for Rookie's silence.
Getting into the gameplay, Rookie comes around (apparently after several hours of unconsciousness) in the city of New Mombossa at night. The atmosphere of this first level is very, very different from previous Halo games. The city is very dark, and the music is very soft and ambient. Between the dark city and a soft saxophone in the soundtrack, I was actually reminded of Blade Runner. This was a great way to establish that playing as an ODST was going to be a very different experience from playing a Spartan from the earlier Halo shooters. The initial tutorials hint at this as well. The ODSTs have a vision mode that amplifies light, has an IFF system, and highlights useful items like weapons, health, and vehicles. You have a health bar, which suggests you'll have to be careful when engaging the enemy. You even start the game with a silenced submachinegun. Between the dark city, the night vision, my quiet weapon, and the purported fragility of my character, I was really expecting stealth elements to play a role in the game.
For better or worse, none of this happens. As for being stealthy, this is rarely a viable option, and in some areas of the city, you have to kill certain enemies to trigger a scripted event. The silencer on your SMG is apparently malfunctioning, as when you use it, enemies hear you just the same as if you'd fired off a rocket. You discover very quickly that not only can you charge into battle, Master Chief style, but that this is actually the best way to play the game, and often the only way to play. Ammo for long distance weapons is usually in short supply. What's more, the Brutes--your primary enemy in the game--have a shielding system that is highly resistant to the longer distance weapons. Most of the time, your best course of action is to charge into battle, throwing grenades, and knocking out the Brutes' shields with shorter-ranged energy weapons.
The game supports this sort of gameplay, as contrary to common sense and game's in-universe logic, you have shields in this game. Well, they don't call them "shields," they call it "stamina." When taking damage, the edges of your screen will glow red, like in Call of Duty, until after a certain number of hits, your life bar will begin to drain. In other words, the shield/health system is identical to the one in Halo: Combat Evolved. You can take a certain amount of damage to your shield system (excuse me, "stamina"), which can recharge, after which you take health damage that can only be replenished with medkits strewn about the city. ODST plays almost exactly like every other Halo shooter. Whether this is good or bad largely depends on your opinion of Halo gameplay.
Speaking of the health system, this brings me to my first major complaint about this game. When your life bar drops, the game beeps at you. It doesn't just beep at you once, it beeps at you continually. The lower your life bar, the more it beeps. This is incredibly annoying. After a big fight, you will be desperate for a medkit, not to get your health up, but to stop the game from beeping at you. I cannot believe that something like this is in a game that was released in 2009, and a Halo title no less! This is the sort of thing you expect to find in an NES game, before playtesting was invented. I cannot imagine what the developers were thinking when they included this "feature."
Moving on, the Rookie makes his way through the city, looking for his squadmates, killing bad guys in a Master Chief fashion, and hoping to God not to take too much damage and have to listen to that ridiculous beeping. During his travels, you'll find audio logs, Doom 3 style, which tell another B story. It's vaguely interesting, though it has next to nothing to do with the A story. When Rookie finds evidence of his squad, the game transitions to a new level. It's now daytime, and you're playing as Buck from the opening cutscene.
Buck's level is more like a regular Halo level. There are Marine allies, more Covenant, and large firefights. Upon completing Buck's level, the game returns to where you left off with the Rookie. This defines the game's level progression. For most of the game, the Rookie is in the city at night, which is a single large level. He has multiple areas he must search, where upon finding a clue, the game moves to a level where you play as a one of the ODSTs. The non-Rookie levels are indistinguishable from other Halo shooters. While Halo has solid gameplay and these levels were enjoyable, it would have been nice to see something innovative. In the Rookie levels, while the gameplay was standard Halo, the atmosphere was strikingly different. Bungie could have given us something new with these levels, like more stealth-based and tactical gameplay. Players looking for a familiar experience would have found it in the other ODSTs' levels, which are straight Halo: Daytime, large firefights, vehicles, and martial music.
At this point, I do have to stop and give the game a major compliment. Halo games always have great soundtracks, and ODST is no exception. From the quiet ambiance of the Rookie's night levels to get-you-pumped guitar riffs while fighting off hordes of Covenant, ODST's music is superb. Like with other Halo games, several times I actually reloaded checkpoints in ODST just to listen to the music.
As I progressed through the campaign, I began to get a little tired of the Rookie's level. Note the singular use there: "Level." The atmosphere of the nighttime level made it interesting at first, but after a while you realize you're doing the exact same thing as the other levels, just with no companions, a smaller weapons selection, next to no vehicles, and you're doing it in the dark. A good third of the game is spent in the Rookie's level, trying to get from one objective to the next as quickly as possible, so you can cue up something more interesting.
Towards the end of the game, the Rookie finally meets up with the other members of his squad. You find out what your mission really is, but I'm not going to give away any details. Predictably, this plays much like any other Halo game. There's a huge flying section, reminiscent of the Arbiter's first level in Halo 2. There's a long driving level, similar to the end of Halo: Combat Evolved. The final battle has you defending your position against waves of Covenant, waiting to be evacuated. Oddly, the end battle was rather easy, especially when compared to an earlier level in the game, where you had to do the exact same thing. Anyway, plot threads are mostly resolved in the ending, which is fairly satisfying. There's also a cameo by a popular Halo character, though I'm not going to say who.
Overall, the campaign is good and enjoyable to play, but it's short. For the most part, it also plays exactly like every other Halo game. If you were expecting something new and different from ODST, you'll be disappointed.
Aside from the new campaign, Halo 3: ODST has a new multiplayer mode: Firefight. You and a team of up to four other players fight progressively larger and stronger waves of Covenant. It's similar to Horde in Gears of War 2 or Nazi Zombies in Call of Duty: World at War.
Firefight is fun, though is suffers from a several major problems. The first of these problems is inexcusable, and is right up there with the low-health-beeping on my "What the hell were they thinking?" list. In Firefight, if anyone leaves, the game shuts down for everyone. No, you didn't read that wrong; if anyone drops, the game's over. Considering that Firefight games can go on for hours (my longest so far is 166 minutes), this is a huge problem. You might be thinking this would make public games unplayable, but it doesn't.
That brings me to the second problem: There are no public games. That's right; there is no matchmaking for Firefight. If you don't have Xbox Live friends with ODST, you're out of luck.
The final problem I have with Firefight I already mentioned: It's incredibly time-consuming. My very first game of Firefight, which I played with just one friend, lasted over an hour. You'd think that being new to the game mode and only playing with two of a possible four players, that we would lose rather quickly. This was not the case. If you're going to settle down for some Firefight, make sure you've got food, water, and a lot of free time. This is especially true considering that if you leave the game, you're royally screwing over your friends.
The final part of the ODST package is a second disc, containing Halo 3's multiplayer. Yes, the competitive multiplayer component of ODST is from a different game. I'm not going to review Halo 3's multiplayer here, as that is well covered elsewhere. The ODST disc does include all the map packs from Halo 3. So if you haven't purchased those, you might save a little money picking up this game. If you already have them, then you have even less reason to buy ODST. Playing the multiplayer disc doesn't even get you ODST achievements; it gets you Halo 3 achievements.
That brings me to one final point: ODST has very easy achievements. I played the game over a weekend to write this review, and I amassed 815/1000 achievement points. If you're into Gamerscore, ODST is a good pick. Most of the achievements can be earned in a single playthrough. What's more, there are only two achievements than cannot be earned solo.
Overall, the content of Halo 3: ODST is of a high quality, but it lacks in quantity. The single-player is good if you like Halo, but it's about half the length of a standard Halo campaign. It's also disappointing that Bungie didn't take the gameplay in any new directions. The rest of the game is incidental. Firefight is fun the first several times, but it's plagued by problems that I think will keep all but a tiny fraction of Halo fans from getting a lot of replayability out of the mode. The Halo 3 multiplayer disc is, well, that's what it is: Halo 3's multiplayer, which isn't even a part of this game. Like I said at the beginning of this review, ODST is an expansion pack, not a full game. While it's a good expansion pack, ODST is being sold at full game price. Most anyone who purchases this will have a good time, but end up wanting more, and rightfully so.