Review: Halo 3: ODST (360)

Unlike the other games however, it doesn’t feature Master Chief, and isn’t strictly linear. You mainly take on the role of one of the titular Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, given the lazy tag of “The Rookie” and set off on a mission during Halo 2’s Covenant invasion of New Mombasa. While in mid-drop, the Covenant ship your supposedly heading for jumps into slipspace, causing all your squad’s drop-pods to scatter and knocking you out for 6 hours. After which you descend into the noir-esque, sandbox-ish city. This acts as the main hub, full of Covenant patrols for you to either take or or avoid, while you’re looking for clues to what happened to your squad. Bungie have tried to make it feel like a film noir mystery, with saxophone music and very (very) dark graphics. It doesn’t really work when you’re carrying a bright purple alien rifle around and shooting blue midgets in the head with it though.

While the city acts as the hub, the majority of the levels save the last few, are actually flash backs. While wandering around the city you’ll find points of interest, a helmet lodged in a TV screen, a mangled sniper rifle and so forth, and these trigger the main missions where you play one of your squad members and find out how that particular item got to where it is. While the hub gives you the option of avoiding fights and the illusion of a sandbox environment, these missions take you back to the good old linear Halo gameplay we know and love. With a few tweaks of course, including adding three members of the excellent Sci-Fi series, Firefly to the cast. Nathan “Mal” Fillion, Alan “Wash” Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin (no relation) “Jayne” Tudyk fill 3 of the other four marines boots, and do a very good job of putting some much needed story into the game. Nolan North, a veteran gaming voice actor completes the playable squad members and is no slouch either.

Since you’re playing as a set of humans, rather than a Spartan II super soldier or Covenant Elite warrior, you’re not quite as indestructible as the Master Chief. You have no recharging over shield in the strictest sense. Instead you have a limited amount of recharging stamina, and when that gets low you have your health bar which will only recover once you find a health pack. Both drain quickly under concentrated fire, so you end up relying on cover more than you would as the Chief, couple this with the fact that your melee attacks can’t even take down a Jackal in one hit and it means the “Rambo” attacks of Halo 3 and co have to take a slight back seat. It doesn’t change the game that much however as then it wouldn’t be Halo, and you can always run over a Brute with a Warthog anyway. You do have one advantage over the Chief however with your VISR helmet, which in dark areas acts like night vision and highlighting enemies in red and allies in green, as well as locating the clues to access the flashback missions in the New Mombasa hub, where it is most useful. Despite making use of Halo 3’s graphic engine, ODST could have done with just a bit more light in it as you’ll spend most of your time as the rookie having the VISR system on just to find your way around, never mind finding mission objectives or for the wonderful audio logs for the side story, “Sadie’s Story” which shows a not-so-typical civilian viewpoint to the invasion. Game length can vary depending if you’re actually going to spend much time exploring the hub, but a first play through should clock in at about 4-6 hours on normal.

As a single player game its rather short, so it’s a good thing for the asking price you get the excellent Halo 3 multiplayer experience on another disc, complete with all the DLC maps and three brand new ones, as well as being able to play the campaign with up to four friends over Xbox Live. You also get the new co-op mode, Firefight. Similar to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode, it pits you against wave upon wave of randomly generated enemies. But what changes things up compared to Horde is the skulls, which are activated each round. Each skull has different attributes, such as causing enemies to go grenade crazy, or there shields to be completely resistant to human bullet-spewing weapons. Each round a new skull is added making the game progressively more difficult not only due to the more difficult and increasing number of enemies, but adding measures such as having to melee them to get your health back, quite a feat when you get a wave of gravity hammer wielding Brutes or Hunters. It has no matchmaking however so you can only play with up to four of your friends.

In many ways ODST seems like a “Greatest Hits” selection of Halo gameplay with vehicle sections, sniping sections, close quarters combat and so forth, oh and no Flood. The flashback missions are undoubtedly the most fun, while the hub level can get tedious with having to walk everywhere. However at the end of the day the single player campaign and Firefight could easily have been done as DLC, and aside from Firefight it doesn’t really bring anything new to the table. There may be some grumbles for some who bought the DLC maps for the Halo 3 multiplayer only to shell out £30 for them again and only getting three new maps as compensation. Still it’s a good solid package but don’t be expecting anything too new.

Rating: 8 / 10

Words by Garry Webber