Halo 3 Review
If you are reading this, chances are that Halo 3 has at very least grabbed your interest. It is more likely, however, that you already have the game and your marathon Master Chief bender is still going strong on Mountain Dew, Hot Pockets and Viverin. Halo fan or not, it is no secret that Halo 3 and its midnight launch were a huge deal. Your local news covered it, commercials for it have been running every 30 seconds and fans were willing to stand in long lines for hours, just for a simple video game.
I have a confession to make - I was one of those fans/losers. I spent a good 45 minutes wandering the Wal-Mart DVD section just waiting for the clerks to break out the Exacto knives, despite the fact that I never really liked the first two games in the series. Hype can be a powerful tool, and Halo 3's ad campaign and buzz prompted me to leave my house at 11:00 p.m., mosey around Wal-Mart for 45 minutes and pick up one of the very first copies. For someone as set in their ways as I am, admitting that I was interested in the game was a big enough struggle; actually buying it was 100 times more difficult.
That is enough about me, but I promise I'm am going somewhere with this. What I'm attempting to clear up is that between not caring for Halo 1 and 2 and my deep-seated hatred of all online gaming, Halo 3 is a still a very, very good game that no 360 owner should be without.
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Halo 3 has been getting great reviews from a ton of websites. If you don't believe me, go check out metacritic.com. Go ahead…. I'll wait. Back? Ok. Most reviews have extremely favorable, as you've now seen. They all seem to share the same complaint, though - the single player campaign isn't very good when compared to the online multiplayer or other games in the genre. For the purposes of this part of the review, I'll only be talking about the single player campaign. We'll get to the online portion in a little bit.
Even though we are pretending that the online features and multiplayer don't exist for this part of the review, the verdict is still a positive one. The third Halo game picks up where the last one left off. Master Chief finally makes it to Earth, but the Covenant are also present and accounted for. After regaining consciousness, Master Chief immediately gets back to what he is good at - splattering bad guys.
I won't mention anything more about the game's plot, but you can start the campaign knowing that all your questions will be answered (unless you've got some really bizarre or arcane questions, that is) and the same formula that made the previous games so popular is more or less the same. It is still just a matter of you versus the Covenant versus the Flood. The plot might not be Shakespeare, but who plays first person shooters for the story (aside from Prey and Bioshock fans)?
