Halo 3 ODST Review
This is the latest Halo title developed by Bungie Studios and it doesn’t star the famous Master Chief. Halo 3 ODST actually takes place before Halo 3. The UNSC are at war with the Covenant, and during the Convenant discover Earth and launch an assault on New Mombasa which is located in Africa. You play as the Rookie an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper (ODST) during the drop down to Earth your pod collides with another pod and you then you crash on Earth. Six hours later you wake and go through the basic Halo tutorial level. You now must make your way through the Streets of New Mombasa to find clues in order to piece together what happened to your follow squad members Dutch, Romero, Mickey, and Dare while you were unconscious. So essentially you start as the Rookie and once you find the clue that links you to a squad member you go ahead and play as your squad member and you live through what happened to them. Very interesting concept and Bungie totally pulled it off. The cut scenes tell a very interesting story.
The story ends with your squad members fly out of the city in a captured Phantom and have took an engineer aboard. Eventually Sergeant Johnson arrives and tells the engineer that he intends to ask questions regarding its knowledge of the Covenant.
ODST plays very different from any other Halo game from the way the story is told to the underlying game mechanics. ODST doesn’t feel like a complete game but more like an expansion which allows Bungie to experiment and try new things. There are only a few new weapon variants, 1 new alien race and everything you shoot comes from Halo 3. The health system works a bit different, the more you get shot the more you stamina goes down that leads to your health going down. Low on health? Find a health pack to regain your health. The other big addition is your visor, see the streets of New Mombasa are very dark and in order to find your way you need to turn your visor on. This is a catch 22 as it allows the enemies to find where you are. Marty O’Donnell does a fantastic job with the soundtrack which really does set the mood for each level.
Another new mode in Halo ODST 3 is Firefight which allows you and up to 3 other friends take on waves of Covenant troops. Out of the box it comes with 10 maps and each map has an achievement for amassing 200,000 in points on a map. This should keep things fun and exciting for a period of time before Bungie will need to release new maps to play on. The one negative about the firefight was that as a team you share 4 lives. So if you one douche on your team that is constantly dying, you will get annoyed very quickly.
There is a second disc included with both standard and limited editions that features Halo 3’s Multiplayer. There aren’t any real big updates from Halo 3’s Mutliplayer. The second disk comes with all 21 Halo 3 maps plus 3 new maps which are only available if you buy Halo ODST. The new maps are Hetertic a remake of the Halo 2 Midship map, Citadel and Longshore.
Overall Halo ODST is a solid game and will provide you with a great story and Halo combat we all love. Overall the game’s length is could be compared to as expansion pack. It really is short but packs in a load of fun either single player or co-op. The real winner in the Halo ODST package is firefight, fighting off wave after wave of Covenant with a limited number of lives is a blast with a group of friends. I really wish that ODST came out as a downloadable expansion instead of a full retail release. The retail price of $69.99 Canadian is a bit overpriced but if you a diehard Halo fan and need your fix Halo ODST is for you.
read moreHalo Mythic Map Pack and Halo Wars Event
On Thursday February 19th 2009 in the west end of Toronto Xbox community members and Media gathered at the Gladstone Hotel to check out the Halo 3 Mythic Map pack and Ensemble Studios final game Halo Wars. Check out the venue below.
Jeff Rivait was on hand from Microsoft to give everyone a demo of Halo Wars. Unfortunately being very new to the RTS (Real Time Strategy games) I decided it was better off not to embarrass myself in front of everyone so I decided just to watch everyone play.
The new Halo 3 map packed call Mythic Maps will be available with the purchase of Halo Wars CE or you will need to wait until spring to get a hold of them. They will also ship with Halo: ODST this fall. The map pack contains 3 maps called Assembly, Orbital and Sandbox. Check out the pictures below of each of the maps. I really enjoyed orbital and driving around on the mongoose honking the horn!. The best moment of the event was playing oddball on Sandbox and killing DarthAlbert III with 1 second left until victory. I held the skull for 76 seconds to make it respectable but ended up losing. As far as for Assembly I just confused on where to go on this map but had some great matches.
Assembly:
Orbital:
Sandbox:
More photos can be found at IGN.com
read moreNew Halo Teaser Trailer – Keep It Clean
That sound? That sound you hear right now? That is the Halo fanboy army rising all at once and screaming for more. After a short 12-hour countdown timer ran out on Bungie’s website, the above trailer was released. Released like a drop of blood in shark infested waters.
The vid only came out about an hour ago and already people are dubbing this unknown game Halo 3.5. My guess? Squad based FPS fighting off the Flood before the arrival of Master Chief. Any thoughts? You know the deal… hit Teh Forums!
EDIT: Just noticed the “Get Ready to Drop” part of the trailer. Could you be playing as the Flood this time?
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