Developed for the Xbox 360 by Bungie
Published by Microsoft Game Studios
Rated “M” for Mature. Contains blood, language, and violence.
Halo 3 ODST is a package of extras, a collection of ideas, tweaks, and imagined scenarios that don’t quite fit into the Halo universe proper and aren’t quite a full adventure in their own right. It includes a far too-short side-story, characters inspired by Joss Whedon’s popular Firefly universe, some spectacular new environments, and a new Firefight multiplayer mode that pits friends to take on waves of enemies. As if sensing that this wasn’t enough to cover the $65 purchase price, Microsoft has included a copy of all the multiplayer content from Halo 3, useful only to the minority of fans who somehow skipped that game.
The story revisits the battle at Earth, when a large Covenant Carrier sits threateningly over New Mombasa. A team of elite marines, known as Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST), are sent to take down the carrier, but as we know from Master Chief’s side of the tale, the situation takes an unusual twist and the ODST are side-tracked onto a different kind of mission.
You get to play each of the team members in-turn, including leader Buck (Nathan Fillion), heavy weapons specialist Dutch (Adam Baldwin), pilot and sniper Mickey (Alan Tudyk), and “Rookie”, a speechless, anonymous everyman marine that’s clearly a nod to Master Chief.
Fillion, Baldwin, and Tudyk all play characters that revisit their roles from the Firefly television series. They deliver a similar sense of humour and swagger, playing off each other and the situation in the same way. Buck is inventive and quick-thinking, except when he’s distracted by a possible romance with mission commander Dare (Tricia Helfer). Dutch is loud, brash, and unwilling to look out for anyone but himself, and Mickey is reliable, supportive, and good-natured.
I’m a fan of both Firefly and Halo, yet find it strange to see the two combined. It doesn’t feel like a proper Halo story, like the one used to admirable effect in Halo Wars, but rather a “What If?” scenario where we get to imagine what it would be like if the crew of Serenity were to find themselves in the Halo universe. There’s a slight nod to this as we’re told that these men are “replacements”, not the usual soldiers taken from the UNSC ranks.
As an experiment, it’s a cool, enjoyable experience, but one unfortunately that is short-lived. When the ODST land on earth, they become scattered. You’re task is to play as each member in turn to bring them all together, and once you do, it ends before it has a chance to really begin.
In terms of game mechanics, the ODST introduce a few new tweaks. These include sound-suppressed variants of the submachine gun and Magnum, making them stealth-friendly, and a special “VISR” vision mode that enhances the game environment, drawing bold outlines over all game objects to help them stand-out and to highlight all enemies, weapons, allies, and pick-ups. It doesn’t make the game any easier, but rather it allows the level designers to add as much detail as they want without fear of distracting or confusing you, the player.
The new game environments are spectacular. The twisting urban streets of New Mombasa have a cybernetic twilight feel about them, in the way they combine the nighttime darkness with the electric lights of the city’s pedestrian crossings and shop storefronts. I love the computerized voices at crosswalks and elevators and that you heal yourself with medical packs offered at vending machines.
The outside maps take place in a Safari park, complete with zebra signs and park benches. The tall grasses, which offer a kind of cover, stand out as individual blades in High Definition. The dirt hills, the sand paths, all make for fun battle areas.
The new multiplayer game included is called Firefight and is a response to the growing popularity of cooperative defense scenarios such as the Horde Mode in Gears of War 2 or the Survival mode in Left For Dead.
You and up to three friends are entrenched within a battle map that you must defend against an escalating series of enemy waves. The advantage that Halo offers over the other games with similar modes is its support for an elaborate points system and mischievous “skull enhancements”. The goal isn’t just to survive for as long as you can, but to do so with style and panache. A medal system offers awards to players who perform headshots or grenade sticks for example, while difficulty-multiplying skulls are triggered by the game as you survive through wave after wave of attacks.
As you survive, the next set of enemies will be tweaked to better dodge your attacks, catch and toss back your grenades, take less damage from specific ammunition, and become loaded with more grenades. In turn you and your friends can become limited in your ability to re-spawn, find that dropped weapons lose half their ammunition, and find that you can’t regain stamina until you melee someone first.
As expected, Firefight is a blast and because of its more cooperative nature and limitation to just four players, reduces the kind of juvenile, competitive behavior that often ruins multiplayer games. There’s no hopping about, no camping, if someone wants to perform the same cheap move over and over, it’s not on you for a change.
When Bungie first began to describe their intent with Halo 3 ODST, they described it as a small side project, an expansion that would let them tinker with new ideas and indeed that is what we have with the final game. There’s an attempt at a detective story, some light jazz on the soundtrack, and an interesting series of audio plays that describe one girl’s plight through the Covenant attack on Earth. These all feel out of place compared to the previous Halo games, but are still worth experiencing.
The issue with Halo 3 ODST isn’t so much that it’s experimental by nature, but that Microsoft is treating it as if it were a full-fledged game and at a full game’s price. If they were to market it as the creative side-project that it is, so that you know what you’re getting into, and at half the price, to match the amount of content you’re getting, then it’d be easy to recommend the game. Instead, I’m left debugging Microsoft’s cheap move.
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