Pretty good game, not as good as Halo 3 but still recommended for Halo fans.
User Rating: 8.5 | Halo 3: ODST X360
Halo 3: ODST is a good game that I would recommend for Halo fans. It is the type of game that grows on you. At first I found the beginning level to be a bit boring and the storyline hard to follow, but as I got further along the game did get more exciting and the storyline became clearer (though I did read the Wikipedia article for help understanding the storyline). Halo 3: ODST takes place during the events of Halo 2, as the Covenant has discovered the location of Earth and massive ship carrying a large invasion force is dropping off covenant troops in the African city of New Mombasa. You play as a rookie member of the UN Space Command Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) while you and your squadmates drop into the city on little pods but get scattered as the Covenant ship enters "slip space" producing a big shock wave that blasts the falling pods. Six hours after the drop your rookie wakes up in New Mombasa after being knocked out in the blast and begins searching the city for his squadmates (it is nightime at this point). The gameplay at this point in time is more detective-like than previous Halo games. Your character must search New Mombasa (avoiding or fighting Covenant forces in the area) for information about the whereabouts of your scattered squadmate, accessing the city's public information system for help. When you reach the last known location of various squadmates, you will find some items that they left behind (such as a weapon or a helmet) and then a cut scene will take you to the next level where you play as another member of the Squad (these levels tend to be more action-packed like the other Halo games) in events that occured before the rookie woke up. After beating one of these levels you will have to go back to playing as the rookie and finding the next known location of other squadmates and the process continues until you eventually reunite with the squad members.
The campaign mode is quite short. The difficulty of it depends on what difficulty you select. I beat the campaign on Normal difficulty which was pretty easy but (after learning that the cut scene at the end of the game includes a little bit extra when the campaign is beaten on the legendary difficulty level) now that I am playing it on Legendary difficulty it is very difficult.
Overall the game is good and pretty fun. The storyline is compelling and interesting once you get used to it. This game offers a nice side story to the main story about Master Chief. ODST does not feature the flood, some players may like this others may not.
The story of how the game was developed is interesting, this game almost wasn't made.Halo ODST was made as a smaller side game to fill in between Halo 3 and Halo Reach. Bungie was working along with Peter Jackson on a game called Halo: Chronicles as well as trying to work on a Halo movie. When both of these projects got cancelled Bungie realized that they had enough time before the planned release of Halo:Reach (which they were working on at that time) to make a smaller side game with the guys that had been working on Chronicles and the movie. And that's how Halo 3: ODST came to be.
