Twitter Style Review
It’s all very marvellous and shiny albeit a little brief.
Story
You are an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper just in case you didn’t know) called ‘rookie’ dropped in to fight the Covenant in the mega-city of New Mombasa, the events in the game coincide with the events in Halo 2 (Covenant have just landed on Earth). Unfortunately the landing goes a touch chaotic and rookie, the poor chap, ends up separated from the rest of the troopers. Your objective is to regroup so you begin strolling around the city finding pieces of the other trooper’s gear as you go. This is were the game becomes somewhat unusual, finding an item induces a Vanilla Sky style reverie in which you act out the actions of you lost troopers.
The game introduces two new weapons a silenced SMG and a scoped Halo: Combat Evolved pistol that makes for very satisfying head shots. The is also a new Covenant creature called an ‘Engineer’ this creature is listed in the data booklet that came with the Halo 3 limited edition tin. The Engineer is a biological supercomputer, as are humans considering the computational power of the brain supposed in range of 10-10000TOPS
[so says], that can control almost any technology and supply nearby allies with a shield.
Firefight
ODST introduces Firefight which is an arcade-mode that can be played solo or co-op. The aim is to collect points by slaughtering wave after wave of Covenant. This mode is really fun, well at least for a while, especially when with a friend. You have to play strategically and skilfully to do well in this mode due to finite health packs and ammo.
Feel of the Game
As you might have expected Halo 3: ODST is a beautiful piece of craft from the way the character moves to how the environment objects interact. I personally have always liked the feel of Halo particularly the preposterous still crossfire. Although there’s no Mastercheif the game hasn’t lost any character as a result. The shield has been replaced with stamina and there’s return of health which brings back some fond memories of Halo: Combat Evolved.
Graphically ODST is spot on the city looks murky and shadowy. It really feels like a war struck city. The game has had a lot of polish applied, little touches like random glow particles in the air, that makes the game look ever so pretty.
Length
The game is a bit too short maybe 10 hours of tangible gameplay, a term which I’m arbitrary going to define as the amount of hours played if you’re not bother about getting 200k+ points on the Firefight mode or some other senseless contrived add on or achievement clearly put into add a few more hours of gameplay. Would it really have been too much trouble to have made it a little longer considering that it uses the same engine as Halo 3.
Conclusion
All in all rather good. I quite enjoyed and can’t wait for Halo: Reach.
