Halo 3
The Halo 3 campaign is a work of art.
It is as if someone had very carefully analyzed everything that worked in the previous installments, examined their flaws as well as what made them into outstanding video games of their time. And then made damn sure that Halo 3 did exactly the opposite of everything that went well in the earlier versions and emphasized the bad. To keep up some similarity, perhaps?
The game in numbers:
Graphics: 8/10 - overall good, but with a few highly visible and very annoying bugs - moire pop-in of object and cartoonish, low res objects.
Music: 4/10 - some pieces from earlier versions aren't too bad, but most of the music lacks drama and is shallower than japanese shop-pop. Lots of skipping and parts of the game that unexplainedly go without a score
Multiplayer: 8/10 - nothing new here, but if you liked Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer, you'll enjoy Halo 3 as well
Gameplay: 1/10 - It starts out bad, gets worse and ultimately just has you groaning through until you can't take it no more or the game is finished.
Background: I loved Halo 1, and I liked Halo 2 - the cliffhanger was harsh, but it did its job - it kept me wanting more. Now that I've played through the conclusion (on Heroic, which was boring as hell and no challenge whatsoever; if you haven't played the game yet, play Easy to reduce the suffering or Lengendary, which is about as hard as 'Normal' was for the first version), I am trying hard to think of bunnies to erase those terrible memories of Halo 3.
The game starts by not picking up where the cliff hanger left off. Because... that way you can piss off your fans right at the start and confuse the few who don't know what Halo is all about.
We're magically in a jungle in Africa, Master Chief falls out of the sky, and, conveniently, Sergeant Johnson and the Arbiter stand right where he comes down. They proceed through a linear valley in a jungle - it's the kind of jungle that is more like a corridor. With no doors. The level is dark and moody. So dark, in fact, that most of the time it's hard to know where you're supposed to go, except of course in those moments when you're blinded by HDR rendered screen glare. It is unclear why we are where we are, what the motivation of our opponents is and where we're trying to go.
In the second level, we made it to the temporary Base of Commander Keyes, which immediately comes under attack by the Brutes, at which point all of us decide to evacuate. Why that base is there and why we're evacuation or where we going is unclear. But we leave a nuclear explosive there, just so. It malfunctions, and Master Chief has to run back through the base, killing every living soldier inside, to set off the bomb, and barely make an escape through a hatch. This action cliche (setting off a doomsday device and then jumping out of the way) is so great that it gets repeated in every second level from hereon out.
One of the things I liked in particular about the earlier versions was the natural flow of the storyline and the artful way in which the sequences that drive the story forwards were rendered in engine and fluidly integrated into gameplay. Halo 3 takes great care to get away from perfection - for the cutsequences, the screen briefly goes pitchblack. Then a cinematic that is visually very different from the ingame graphics starts. Great care is also taken to ensure that gameplay and cinematic do not match up - suddenly you're somewhere else, talking to a group of characters with unclear motivation but a sense of urgency, and off you are to the next mission.
The story goes on to drop huge big monster machines on you - by the third time this happens, you find yourself mostly thinking 'not again, please?!' that you have to destroy by unfettering their reactor cores and causing a nuclear explosion. Take care to run a few steps away, otherwise you might get hurt. One of thing about these ship-sized walking machines: they drop out of the empty sky. Yeah, I know, we're fighting opponents with amazing technology.
Luckily, you have an amazing side kick in the arbiter, who is with you for a number of missions. While you can get killed by one shot of energy rifle fire, the Arbiter is immune to all damage. You may, in fact, just run through the levels behind him, and he'll do all the slaughtering for you. As in previous versions of Halo, your ammo is limited, but that hardly matters - bashing any monster with one of the empty weapons instantly kills it. On heroic. Makes me feel quite the hero. Conveniently, there's an overabundance of weapons located absolutely everywhere: the crashed floodinfested covenant vessel is full or UNSC shotguns, for example.
All the while, the sound occasionally skips and you have ample time to wonder why the graphics look so much like claymation. I bet someone spent a lot of time looking into how to write pixel shaders that authentically reproduce the look of actors in real bad latex masks to make the aliens more appealing to an audience that grew up on 80s Star Trek repeats.
You go on, blow up more stuff meaninglessly. At one point, Earth and the last archive of the biosphere of our galaxy have been hopelessly infested with the flood, and the covenant is about to fire all halos to start afresh. So, of course, Master Chief and the Arbiter stop the convenant with the help of the flood. Yeah. At the end of the level, the Arbiter comments: "Maybe we exchanged one evil for another?" Duh? What did you expect? Out of character much?
Then again, a prophet who is trying to set off a doomsday device but delays while his sworn enemies fight through a long level to get there to stop him by sermonizing to his audience about how sad the treachery of those who are currently coming to stop him is, well, such a prophet doesn't really deserve any better.
Luckily, we have some distraction when Keyes and later Johnson are killed off with all the emotional involvement of a cheap Brazilian soap opera (sorry to insult Brazilian soap opera by comparing it to this abomination!). Oh, and the monitor is on your side but then he gets angry and you have to shoot him a few times to destroy it. Right... nobody saw that coming.
To bring matters to a conclusion, there's a broken Halo right in the installation, and it sort of lifts out of the sea and you jump on it and detonate it. But you drive away quickly before this monstrous galaxy-sterilizing device fires, racing your jeep across the disintegrating series of platforms that Sergeant Johnson took from his frigate (why he would take such a circuitous route remains a mystery), jump into the frigate and the frigate escapes the galaxy sterilization by racing away quickly. Just so that matters aren't so hard, there is no timer, so you can get out and smoke a cigarette for an hour or so while the device is 'just about' to detonate.
In conclusion, the same intern who was responsible for the editing of Star Wars Episode III probably got the job of cobbling together a storyline for Halo 3 that would hold up long enough to sell through the first day without anybody noticing that they'd been sold a rotten bag of cliches.
Halo 3 makes a great present for someone you really dislike - "look, I could have spent money on a good book, or a bag of stale breadrolls, but instead I got you *this*"; or if you happen to own a pet with low standards, maybe your dog can get some enjoyment out of chewing on your copy.
Other than that, I can think of no good reason why anyone would want to waste hours of their life by ruining all the good memories the first versions engendered with this accumulation of shallow characters engaging in irrational behaviors interrupted by deus ex machina devices materializing at the most inappropriate moments.
It is as if someone had very carefully analyzed everything that worked in the previous installments, examined their flaws as well as what made them into outstanding video games of their time. And then made damn sure that Halo 3 did exactly the opposite of everything that went well in the earlier versions and emphasized the bad. To keep up some similarity, perhaps?
The game in numbers:
Graphics: 8/10 - overall good, but with a few highly visible and very annoying bugs - moire pop-in of object and cartoonish, low res objects.
Music: 4/10 - some pieces from earlier versions aren't too bad, but most of the music lacks drama and is shallower than japanese shop-pop. Lots of skipping and parts of the game that unexplainedly go without a score
Multiplayer: 8/10 - nothing new here, but if you liked Halo and Halo 2 multiplayer, you'll enjoy Halo 3 as well
Gameplay: 1/10 - It starts out bad, gets worse and ultimately just has you groaning through until you can't take it no more or the game is finished.
Background: I loved Halo 1, and I liked Halo 2 - the cliffhanger was harsh, but it did its job - it kept me wanting more. Now that I've played through the conclusion (on Heroic, which was boring as hell and no challenge whatsoever; if you haven't played the game yet, play Easy to reduce the suffering or Lengendary, which is about as hard as 'Normal' was for the first version), I am trying hard to think of bunnies to erase those terrible memories of Halo 3.
The game starts by not picking up where the cliff hanger left off. Because... that way you can piss off your fans right at the start and confuse the few who don't know what Halo is all about.
We're magically in a jungle in Africa, Master Chief falls out of the sky, and, conveniently, Sergeant Johnson and the Arbiter stand right where he comes down. They proceed through a linear valley in a jungle - it's the kind of jungle that is more like a corridor. With no doors. The level is dark and moody. So dark, in fact, that most of the time it's hard to know where you're supposed to go, except of course in those moments when you're blinded by HDR rendered screen glare. It is unclear why we are where we are, what the motivation of our opponents is and where we're trying to go.
In the second level, we made it to the temporary Base of Commander Keyes, which immediately comes under attack by the Brutes, at which point all of us decide to evacuate. Why that base is there and why we're evacuation or where we going is unclear. But we leave a nuclear explosive there, just so. It malfunctions, and Master Chief has to run back through the base, killing every living soldier inside, to set off the bomb, and barely make an escape through a hatch. This action cliche (setting off a doomsday device and then jumping out of the way) is so great that it gets repeated in every second level from hereon out.
One of the things I liked in particular about the earlier versions was the natural flow of the storyline and the artful way in which the sequences that drive the story forwards were rendered in engine and fluidly integrated into gameplay. Halo 3 takes great care to get away from perfection - for the cutsequences, the screen briefly goes pitchblack. Then a cinematic that is visually very different from the ingame graphics starts. Great care is also taken to ensure that gameplay and cinematic do not match up - suddenly you're somewhere else, talking to a group of characters with unclear motivation but a sense of urgency, and off you are to the next mission.
The story goes on to drop huge big monster machines on you - by the third time this happens, you find yourself mostly thinking 'not again, please?!' that you have to destroy by unfettering their reactor cores and causing a nuclear explosion. Take care to run a few steps away, otherwise you might get hurt. One of thing about these ship-sized walking machines: they drop out of the empty sky. Yeah, I know, we're fighting opponents with amazing technology.
Luckily, you have an amazing side kick in the arbiter, who is with you for a number of missions. While you can get killed by one shot of energy rifle fire, the Arbiter is immune to all damage. You may, in fact, just run through the levels behind him, and he'll do all the slaughtering for you. As in previous versions of Halo, your ammo is limited, but that hardly matters - bashing any monster with one of the empty weapons instantly kills it. On heroic. Makes me feel quite the hero. Conveniently, there's an overabundance of weapons located absolutely everywhere: the crashed floodinfested covenant vessel is full or UNSC shotguns, for example.
All the while, the sound occasionally skips and you have ample time to wonder why the graphics look so much like claymation. I bet someone spent a lot of time looking into how to write pixel shaders that authentically reproduce the look of actors in real bad latex masks to make the aliens more appealing to an audience that grew up on 80s Star Trek repeats.
You go on, blow up more stuff meaninglessly. At one point, Earth and the last archive of the biosphere of our galaxy have been hopelessly infested with the flood, and the covenant is about to fire all halos to start afresh. So, of course, Master Chief and the Arbiter stop the convenant with the help of the flood. Yeah. At the end of the level, the Arbiter comments: "Maybe we exchanged one evil for another?" Duh? What did you expect? Out of character much?
Then again, a prophet who is trying to set off a doomsday device but delays while his sworn enemies fight through a long level to get there to stop him by sermonizing to his audience about how sad the treachery of those who are currently coming to stop him is, well, such a prophet doesn't really deserve any better.
Luckily, we have some distraction when Keyes and later Johnson are killed off with all the emotional involvement of a cheap Brazilian soap opera (sorry to insult Brazilian soap opera by comparing it to this abomination!). Oh, and the monitor is on your side but then he gets angry and you have to shoot him a few times to destroy it. Right... nobody saw that coming.
To bring matters to a conclusion, there's a broken Halo right in the installation, and it sort of lifts out of the sea and you jump on it and detonate it. But you drive away quickly before this monstrous galaxy-sterilizing device fires, racing your jeep across the disintegrating series of platforms that Sergeant Johnson took from his frigate (why he would take such a circuitous route remains a mystery), jump into the frigate and the frigate escapes the galaxy sterilization by racing away quickly. Just so that matters aren't so hard, there is no timer, so you can get out and smoke a cigarette for an hour or so while the device is 'just about' to detonate.
In conclusion, the same intern who was responsible for the editing of Star Wars Episode III probably got the job of cobbling together a storyline for Halo 3 that would hold up long enough to sell through the first day without anybody noticing that they'd been sold a rotten bag of cliches.
Halo 3 makes a great present for someone you really dislike - "look, I could have spent money on a good book, or a bag of stale breadrolls, but instead I got you *this*"; or if you happen to own a pet with low standards, maybe your dog can get some enjoyment out of chewing on your copy.
Other than that, I can think of no good reason why anyone would want to waste hours of their life by ruining all the good memories the first versions engendered with this accumulation of shallow characters engaging in irrational behaviors interrupted by deus ex machina devices materializing at the most inappropriate moments.
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