Token Female Gamer

Well thus far I have managed to blow my one resolution out of the water. Its already the last day in February and I am posting my very first review for this year. Ick! (Happy leap day BTW!)

I will say that I have plenty of very valid and important excuses, but I shan’t bore you will the details.

First person Shooters (FPS) on the console are really not my strong suit, but this game has been so darn popular I had to see what I was missing. It turns out that plowing through the entire game wasn’t that much of a sacrifice – it was short and I had a good partner to enjoy it with.

Thankfully my husband is infinitely patient. =D

Never the less, here is my Halo 3 Review:

My Insights

I have to admit that I just don’t understand the hype that this game has gotten. Part of that hype could be from the $10 million Microsoft spent on publicity. That still doesn’t explain the vast success of the Halo series. After completely avoiding all things halo until this third release, I decided it was time to double-check my initial reaction.

Back when the first Halo came out I gave it a minor shot, but found it really uninteresting and mostly just frustrating.
Three successful games later I was still not a fan. There was something I had missed, wasn’t there? I mean the game is so darn successful it must be decent. So I had to give it another shot.

One thing I should mention before I get much further is that I am terrible (horrible!!!) at first person shooters on the console. I’m a Quake bred FPS girl. The console controls require a higher learning curve then I have ever been willing to commit too.

Knowing that I would never finish by myself, I recruited my husband to play with me. Since he set up the whole thing, while I was getting snacks, he ended up begin player one, which worked out great. Not only did I not have to play a character named Master Chief (it’s a name only a 16 year old boy could appreciate), but I also ended up with the vastly superior character – the Arbiter.

At first I wasn’t so sure about the character choices, I mean neither of them were girls nor were cute in any way. Thankfully you don’t actually look at your character while playing. About half way through the game I noticed mounted machine guns around the levels. Turns out that the Arbiter can rip them off their mounting and stroll around with them. It pops the camera into a third person view. Such fun – such joy. Master Chief (besides having a totally dorky name) didn’t have enough upper body strength for this little maneuver.

The other highlight for me was riding in the tanks; I think in the game they are called scorpions. You get to drive and still control the main cannon. Best part of the game! And unlike the machine guns you don’t run out of ammunition in the tanks. Sadly you can’t drive them inside the buildings; otherwise I would have turned the whole game into a tank game.
Another wise choice I made (this one deliberate) was to insist we play on easy mode. This made all the difference in the world. My complete lack of aiming skill with the controller meant I needed that easy factor to allow me to become more comfortable with the controller and the game.

Review

Release date: September 25 2007
Platform I played on: xBox 360

Website: http://www.halo3.com/
Developer: Bungie

Game Summery

Humans versus aliens. Defend the human race from begin wiped out by a bunch of lunatic alien zealots. Save the world alone or with your buddies. But beware friendly fire.

Game play

This is a standard first person shooter on the Xbox 360 console.

A selection of different weapons is available and ammunition is finite. There does seem to be plenty of other weapons to pick up if you run out of ammunition. Although I never ended up getting to hang onto my favorite weapons for very long, their drop rate was hideously low and ammunition for them was practically non-existent.

(My machine guns never lasted as long as I wanted them too. I would have been more then happy to run around in third person for the entire game with my clunky machine gun. /sniff)

As far as I understand dual wielding guns is also a major selling point for this game. Although the guns that you are able to dual wield seems almost random.

Vehicles are also available for driving – and are required for some of the missions. Most of them handle terribly. The tank was a blast to drive, sadly they are only found in two of the missions.

One thing to note on the vehicles is that you do not want the NPCs driving for you. Buddy up with a real person or just do the driving because the AI for the NPCs is terrible in the drivers seat. I spent almost 10 minutes in one mission riding around in circles. My thinking was that if I let the NPC drive then I would get a chance at using the mounted weapon on the vehicle. That was the last time I let an NPC drive.

World

Although the world was crisply modeled and quite colorful, it made for terrible game play. The level design was atrocious. I think we spent most of our time running around trying to figure out where we were supposed to go.
We usually ran after the NPC team members and when alone or forced to lead we would run around until we found some bad guys.

Eventually we figured out that there is a little directional arrow that sometimes pops up to indicate where you are supposed to go, but its appearance seems to be random. Also it very often leads one into dead ends. A simple arrow is not very good at specifying that you have to go around the corner three corridors back to get past the dead end.

We also managed in the very first mission to lose the NPCs because they jumped up this waterfall that we couldn’t jump up no matter how hard we tried. And we tried for rather longer then I wish to admit. Thankfully my husband figured out that we could just run around the hill and catch up with the NPCs again.

For some reason they also put in large chasms that if you happen to jump down there (or get pushed or back off into oblivion…), result in instant death. This also is the result of jumping down off a very high building.
So falling is bad. This is learned pretty early on. Now the strange thing here is that the level design sometime requires you to take these leaps of faith to progress further in the level.

The little arrow told us to jump to our deaths quite a few times. It’s a matter of finding out exactly where the arrow is safe to follow.
Beware following the arrow pointing down!

Story

From the very first moment that the game began I was confused about the story. None of it made any sense. Clearly I had missed a vast section of the story from having not played the first two games, so I wasn’t expecting to understand everything. But to be completely confused without a real chance of catching up was rather perturbing.
They could have provided me with a recap at the beginning of the game. Would it have been so hard to put in a two minute “Previously in Halo…”?

To add insult to injury they managed to pad the game with so much story time I wanted to scream. It would have been super nice to be able to skip through the story part. Although this probably would have cut down our playtime by quite a bit.

Someone also thought it would be a good idea to stop play randomly and have seizure inducing images flash at you. Supposedly this was to further the story. Clearly this didn’t work for me.

Graphics

The graphics were fine, but really not as highly advanced as I was expecting. I guess that its one downfall of the super hyped game. The characters in particular just looked a bit funky and the animation lacked finesse.

I really wish people would give up on the lip-syncing thing. It has so far not managed to look good. The characters end up looking like puppets thus taking away from the realism that the lip-syncing is trying to create.

Replay ability

I finished the story mode game and really have no interest in playing over. I would guess that for this game the multiplayer is the big draw in replay ability.
Also there are different levels of difficulty for those interested in playing through the game again.

I have to say that I really appreciate how many levels of difficulty there were. This allowed me to play at a challenge level that I found enjoyable.
And there are of course xbox achievements to be gained. Which basically is just another way of saying: look at how much grinding I did in this game.

Multiplayer

Multiplayer is this games strength. I would never have gotten through this game if I hadn’t been playing with my husband.
There are a few different options here. There is coop offline and coop online. There are also various versions of PvP.

We played solely offline cooperative. The screen was split – first player utilized the top portion of the screen and the second player used the bottom half. In some games this split in the TV screen real estate can cause visual problems, but I found that since the game mostly played in first person mode, being able to see my surroundings in the game was not that impeded. There were definitely times that were harder to see then others but that can’t be solely blamed on the split screen. Some credit has to be given to shoddy lighting, poor level design and huge gun graphics.

Take note: any online activities, those not limited to your friends, leaves you a willing victim to twelve year old pre teens with small penis syndrome (unless of course your friends fall into said category). I also recommend avoiding voice chat due to this affliction of the online community.

Another thing to note in multiplayer is that this game supports friendly fire. Since both of us tended to run around like chickens with our heads cut off, we managed to hit each other quite often. My husband even got a few one shot kills off on me. Really quite impressive. =)

Things that bothered me

-Loading time
I’m not sure how they manage this but loading times for this game are hideously long. We spent a good 10 minutes loading one level. That was the longest load time but I would say we averaged about 5 minutes load time. I really would have liked some better optimization here. I mean its not like they have varying hardware to deal with.

-Confusing story
The story was not only confusing but it kept getting in the way of the game. I like to think of game stories as a subtle guide into their world, not as a way to pad the total playtime.

The interludes in the middle of playing that brought up flickering images of some character were by far the most disruptive. Whoever thought that was a good idea must not have actually seen the effect that they create – a sudden stop in playing. Again a great example of how the story really interfered in the game.

-Master Chief – need I say more?

-Physics is crappy, especially driving.
I’m not sure what sort of physics system that they used in Halo, but it seems to be pretty normal to the standard FPS physics systems out there currently. It’s an epidemic. The most notable item for me is that nothing seems to have weight. Dead bodies go flying around; boxes scatter at the mere touch. Its absurd looking and in no way relates to real physics at all.

This most annoyed me when it came to driving vehicles. I found them tough to steer and almost impossible to keep upright due to their lack of weight. Thankfully I found the tank, which actually acted more like a real tank by staying on the ground and moving slowly. But then I have already gushed enough about that. =)

-Confusing directions, never knew where to go.
One thing that the story was supposed to convey was your mission objectives. Not very clearly it turns out; where to go was always a mystery. There was no level map to speak of in the game.
We mostly ran around looking for bad guys and assumed that if an area was empty it was because either it was not important or we had already cleared it out.

-Where do I stand to pick something up or activate something?
When you run over a weapon laying on the ground a message flashes on the screen showing you which hand you can equip this abandoned weapon in if you so choose. Well most of the time I had run well past that specific spot before stopping to check it out. Then it turned into hunt for the weapon on the ground – back up a little, nope, little to the left, nope, little to the right, nope – a real needle in the haystack.

A similar dilemma happened when trying to board vehicles. Most vehicles can carry a bunch of people and have a bunch of different stations, so if I wanted to drive I had to inch my way along the side of the vehicle until the appropriate message popped up on screen. Many times I ended up getting into the wrong spot. This is how my experience with NPC’s driving came about.

-No stash, no weapons swapping
One thing that happens in games that require ammo is that I run out. I like to have a way to store ammo, more then this game allows me to carry. Also you can’t really carry any other weapons. There is no storing up, no stashing. I like my stash of weapons.

Game finished

We played all the way through to the end of the story line.
I’m done playing. I have no desire to play through those levels again. Now I might have been tempted if I could just go drive the tank around a bit, but sadly this isn’t a tank game.

Time played

7 hours. Wimpy playtime, considering that we finished the entire campaign and a good third of that time was wasted in story telling mode. And really, we were not rushing.

Rating

I’m going to have to give two different ratings for this game.

Mood

Last thoughts

Although I did enjoy playing multiplayer, I would still not classify myself as a Halo fan. I’m done playing and although I was let down that it was only 7 hours long I was also somewhat glad.

Tags: action, cooperative, fps, xbox360

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:50 pm and is filed under Console Games, Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.