Halo 3, wow. This game has fallen victim to the George Lucas disease. Don't get me wrong, Halo is one of my very favorite franchises, and I was super-expectant of the sequel that had me convinced of its greatness with commercials I found were more exciting than the game itself. When we finally got a copy in good condition the disc was popped in the tray and we prepared to be amazed, and prepared, and prepared... Halo 3, was simply Halo 2 with a few innovations, improved graphics that are merely average next-gen, and a sloppier, more two-dimensional story-line. This makes me terribly sad because the story and the characters of the previous installments surpassed the excellent action.
I was appalled at the disappointment, and looked to see if anyone else felt the same, but everywhere I looked outside of my home city and a few others, people were raging about how great it was, blinded by their expectations to see much fault in the game.
In Halo 3, the combat remains intact, but repetitive enemies and the annoyingly present Flood detracted from the overall intensity of battling building-high enemies every now and again. Half of the new features they paraded in the videos and commercials are nowhere to be found, and the online ranking system is a joke.
No matter how well you do in a match, you are awarded one measly experience point, and if you lose to a superior team (which happens often because of the lope-sided match-making) twice in a row you lose an experience point, a whole match wasted.
In the single-player experience, the characters I had cared for in Halo and Halo 2 were torn to pieces with terribly silly character models and ferociously cardboard lines. Sergeant Johnson has been turned into a bug-eyed, white gangster wannabe whom I no longer cared for because of this and other reasons you would have to play to know.
The level design is beautiful and could have gone so far, but many off-tracks turn the missions from an open-ended sand-box battleground into an annoyingly repetitive maze combined with poor-lighting and a lack of any sort of direction other than an ambiguous arrow. In the cuts-scenes before most missions, you can see the background is painfully and obviously just a painted sheet.
Halo 3 isn't all bad though, the graphics are passable, and the selection of weapons is diverse and usually gratifying when you get a hold of the real stuff. But the weapons came too late in the game to be justified, and the greatest new vehicle, the hornet, is only in a few missions. The most significant highlights of the game is when you are alongside an army tackling even more powerful armies, but this seldom occurs when compared to all of the mundane solo missions you have to trudge through.
All in all, Halo 3 is an average title with enormous potential, but sadly the folks at Bungie didn't expand as far as they should have to live up to their other Halo masterpieces. If you are a fan of Halo, by all means go ahead and get it, but if you want real action and a great story, look elsewhere.
I was appalled at the disappointment, and looked to see if anyone else felt the same, but everywhere I looked outside of my home city and a few others, people were raging about how great it was, blinded by their expectations to see much fault in the game.
In Halo 3, the combat remains intact, but repetitive enemies and the annoyingly present Flood detracted from the overall intensity of battling building-high enemies every now and again. Half of the new features they paraded in the videos and commercials are nowhere to be found, and the online ranking system is a joke.
No matter how well you do in a match, you are awarded one measly experience point, and if you lose to a superior team (which happens often because of the lope-sided match-making) twice in a row you lose an experience point, a whole match wasted.
In the single-player experience, the characters I had cared for in Halo and Halo 2 were torn to pieces with terribly silly character models and ferociously cardboard lines. Sergeant Johnson has been turned into a bug-eyed, white gangster wannabe whom I no longer cared for because of this and other reasons you would have to play to know.
The level design is beautiful and could have gone so far, but many off-tracks turn the missions from an open-ended sand-box battleground into an annoyingly repetitive maze combined with poor-lighting and a lack of any sort of direction other than an ambiguous arrow. In the cuts-scenes before most missions, you can see the background is painfully and obviously just a painted sheet.
Halo 3 isn't all bad though, the graphics are passable, and the selection of weapons is diverse and usually gratifying when you get a hold of the real stuff. But the weapons came too late in the game to be justified, and the greatest new vehicle, the hornet, is only in a few missions. The most significant highlights of the game is when you are alongside an army tackling even more powerful armies, but this seldom occurs when compared to all of the mundane solo missions you have to trudge through.
All in all, Halo 3 is an average title with enormous potential, but sadly the folks at Bungie didn't expand as far as they should have to live up to their other Halo masterpieces. If you are a fan of Halo, by all means go ahead and get it, but if you want real action and a great story, look elsewhere.