Pace Paw Print

Media Credit: xbox.com

Halo 3 for the Xbox 360, the presumably final game in the Halo series has finally arrived. While the game could never possibly live up to the hype surrounding it, Halo 3 still manages to be (for the most part) an enjoyable game that brings the same level of entertainment that its predecessors brought.

The story of Halo 3 begins shortly after Halo 2 ended. The hero Master Chief crash-lands on Earth. Immediately he has to prevent The Covenant, the evil army of aliens that are trying to eliminate all of mankind, from activating a device located under Africa that will destroy all life in the galaxy. Along the way Master Chief has to destroy the parasitic organism known as The Flood and save his friend, the artificial intelligence known as Cortana, who has been captured by the Flood.

The single player part of the game, the part that follows Master Chief around, is the weakest part of the game. The game takes about ten hours to beat on the normal difficulty setting. The story does not really add much to the Halo mythos, instead feeling more like a rush to finish the story. A lot of characters die in the game, but their deaths seem to exist only to make the story more melodramatic. The last part of the last level is almost exactly like the end of the first Halo game. The end of the game is anticlimactic; given the amount of time the developers had and how important the Halo series is to people, it would have been nice if the ending was a bit grander.

The intelligence of the computer controlled characters has improved a bit from the last game. They still do not know how to drive any vehicles, but at least they know not to fire a weapon when someone friendly is standing in front of them.

The single player game contains a co-operative mode that allows one person to team up a friend and play through the game together. It is also possible now to play the co-operative mode with someone online instead of just with friends.

But the Halo series had never been about the single player game, the main attraction has always been the multiplayer part. Halo 3 has the same multiplayer modes that the previous Halo like Slayer and Capture the Flag that can be played online with total strangers. The multiplayer mode has brand new maps to play on, new weapons to play with, and all the old weapons from the previous two games to play with as well.

The biggest addition to the multiplayer mode is the new matchmaking mode. Using a ranking system determined by how well a player plays, the game puts people of similar levels of skill in games together so that no one person is more skilled than another. The only problem with the matchmaking mode is that the people playing cannot choose what type of multiplayer game they want to play, instead making the choice random. Slayer is one game that players can choose specifically and even then the levels and the weapons that can be used are chosen randomly. At least if the people playing do not like the setup they are given, they vote to cancel the game before it starts, which will then result in another random game being set up. It is still possible to choose specific multiplayer games in regular multiplayer mode, but for now with everyone in matchmaking mode, it is difficult to find anyone besides friends to play with.

The move from the Xbox to the Xbox 360 has improved the graphics to Halo somewhat. The levels and people do no look any more realistic, but the game has many more little details that make the it just a bit more immersive. Machine guns now disperse individual shell casings when spent, airships can be seen in air-to-air combat in the distance, and all vehicles can now be destroyed in spectacular explosions.

The game also includes a Forge mode that allows the players to edit multiplayer levels which they can share with other people online. What a person can do in the Forge mode is limited though. Players are only allowed to use levels that already exist in multiplayer mode, not create their own. What the player can do is alter what items appear where in the levels. The number of items a person can put in a level is limited thanks to the player being given a limited budget and giving item prices, making it so only a limited amount of items can go into one level. This means that making a large level filled with nothing but exploding barrels and rocket launchers would be impossible unless the level was small.

There is no reason for any fan of the Halo series to avoid buying Halo 3. It contains almost everything a fan of the series would want. The single player is disappointing, but that will eventually be forgotten as everybody just ends up playing the multiplayer mode with the same amount of zeal as the previous two games.

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