Halo 3: ODST

Bungie continues its seemingly never-ending Halo franchise with its latest installment, Halo 3: ODST. But have the developers lost the magic touch they had making the previous games so successful?

ODST puts you in the role of an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper (ODST) giving a 'new' perspective to the Human-Covenant war.

The game starts with a really boring credits sequence before taking you to the main menu; a less impressive copy of Halo 3's menu. The game plunges you into action, giving you a first person experience of sitting (standing?) in a drop pod and plummeting -- well, not really plummeting -- toward Earth... but not before giving you an unnecessarily long introductory movie that shows off the games, well, rather disappointing graphics.

And so you begin your gentle glide toward Earth in a drop pod. But, come on, this is Halo. Something is bound to go wrong and... oh, it does.

Bungie has always created beautifully detailed, impressive sky-, sea-, and landscapes; very nice graphics for everything... except humans. Their faces aren't anything spectacular, and Halo 3: ODST really shows it -- the introductory sequence shows some of the most pathetic character, especially facial, graphics compared to other next-gen games.

Bungie's game designers decide to take the Call of Duty route of gameplay -- switching between characters from mission to mission. Where Call of Duty does this well, Halo: ODST falls flat on its face. Bungie's mission-to-mission character switching creates an unnecessarily convoluted and difficult-to-follow storyline which, because of the frequent character switching, feels rather holey.

Halo 3's "terminals," which were loaded with readable information on the backstory of the Halo universe, were cool and somewhat unexpected. ODST takes it to the next level -- and not in a good way -- by incorporating complete backstories (through the use of audio files accessed from terminals) for random and pointless characters that add nothing to the story and who are completely unimportant to the game itself.

ODST's sounds are no different from Halo 3's, except this time the M7 Caseless SMG has a silencer (so basically, it sounds like any other generic silenced weapon).

The music is way off -- the noticeable absence of Michael Salvatori seems to have negatively affected all of the music in the game. Martin O'Donnell has some drum music (classic Halo style), some solo piano music (which lacks the power and drive of Halo 3's piano themes), and... a very film noir style complete with a jazzy alto saxophone that really doesn't make me think 'Halo.' The rest of the music is Halo's standard 'morphing synths' -- ambient background music with no discernable theme that tries to capture the mood of the level.

Multiplayer is... well, there's no real multiplayer. The game comes with some new and exclusive maps for Halo 3 (yes, people still play that!) and yet another wave-after-wave survival game mode (remember Gears 2's "Horde" and World at War's "Nazi Zombies"?) which seems to count, in Bungie's eyes, as a multiplayer game mode.

Overall, Halo: ODST was a disappointment. It didn't feel at all like Halo. Instead, it felt like a cheap ripoff: a one-part-stealth, one-part-action generic first person shooter that had Halo weapons and transplanted characters (like Brutes, Grunts, and ODST troopers).

Review Recap:
- Gameplay 6/10 - Halo 3 without the Halo, feels generic and repetitive; overly convoluted story with a few new weapons and characters
- Replay Value 6/10 - "Firefight" provides some entertainment, but we've seen it done before and done better...
- Graphics 5/10 - Bungie's detailed levels crossed with its awful character design, makes the game feel almost comical
- Sound 5/10 - Same as Halo 3's sounds; voice acting is nothing special; music belongs in a '40s detective movie, not a Halo game