No game is perfect. Some games get perfect reviews and fewer still even perfect their genre, but a no game really deserves an absolutely perfect 5/5, 10/10, or 100%. No game is ever completely free from lag, glitches, errors, and just plain old-fashioned bad ideas. And so we have a new feature the Crisis Roast, in which we will take the greatest games of our time and give them the roasting, aka a bashing, that they so thoroughly deserve. Enjoy!
Ahh Halo 3. Has it already been two years? Two years since all that hype. Since receiving so many game of the year awards and being such a powerhouse seller for Bungie and Microsoft. Times just fly by in the video games industry and you know what, time has not peen kind to Halo 3.
2007 gave us a lot of great looking games, Uncharted Drake’s Fortune, Crysis, Call of Duty 4. But Halo 3 wasn’t one of these games. Halo 3 looked average in 2007. As a matter of fact it doesn’t even compare with the Xbox 360’s other major shooter Gears of War. And I’m not comparing it to Gears of War 2 no I’m saying that Halo 3, a game that launched in September of 2007, did not have graphics equivalent to the November 2006 Gears of War. And keep in mind the Unreal Engine 3 on which Gears is based is designed for use in multiple consoles. It’s not designed to tap into the inner power of any console’s hardware like you would expect of an exclusive.
Graphics aren’t everything though right? How the game plays ultimately determines whether or not a game will be good and if there is one thing Halo 3 does well is it copies Halo 2’s fantastic gameplay perfectly. Yes yes I know it’s a sequel and sequels should play a lot like the games that come before them, put shouldn’t we have expected a little more innovation in between console generations? We certainly didn’t let Resident Evil 5 of the hook for not innovating on RE4’s gameplay. And don’t say, “Halo 3 isn’t like RE4 its gameplay is perfect as is.” It’s not perfect as is; in fact it’s petty archaic by today’s standards not to have iron sites mapped opposite a trigger button and melee mapped to the right analogue stick.
On top of the outdated controls the actual shooty action hasn’t changed a bit. The Flood and the Covenant use many of the same weapons and tactics as they did in the first and second games. In Halo 3 you can expect the Covenant to hang pack and shoot at you while the Flood will charge at you wildly like decapitated chickens. The enemy A.I. does a good job of pretending to be intelligent, but however immersive it may be to hear Brutes shouting orders to other enemy types I never once felt threatened by their tactics. The friendly A.I. is even worse. Play this game in anything put co-op and you’ll have to choose between driving around and waiting for your allies to wake up and shoot the looming enemy tank or take the Warthog turret yourself and risk being killed because your driver dozes off mid-battle and runs you right into an obstruction.
If the gameplay and graphics aren’t doing it for you there is always Halo’s epic storyline, but can we call this what it really is? It’s good for a game about a faceless space marine fighting space aliens, but it doesn’t compare to games like BioShock, Mass Effect, or Metal Gear Solid, which offer rich narratives and broader casts of characters. Moreover, the story has just become far more convoluted than it needs to be and it quickly reaching Pirates 3 levels of backstabbing. The understated romance between Master Chief and Cortana is a just weird and frankly I have no idea how that relationship will ever get consummated.
The set pieces, like the Scarab fight and the final climactic Warthog escape, are all very easy and seriously anticlimactic. The Arbiter, who played a huge role in Halo 2 and brought a new dimension to Halo’s story, has his role cut down to pretty much just giving exposition and hanging around for the 7-9 hour romp. Speaking of which 7-9 hours is being a little too generous. Play this game on anything but Legendary difficulty and you’ll blaze though in a single determined play through, even faster in co-op. If you don’t care for Halo multiplayer than this game is the ultimate rental.
Which brings us to the meat of the game, multiplayer. 4-player co-op and various game modifying skulls should make us want to replay the game, but the linearity of all the encounters, the shortness of the overall experience, and the surprising amount of backtracking all undermine the experience. As for the competitive modes, they’re all there. For the vast majority of games multiplayer is multiplayer is multiplayer and Halo 3 is no different. Some maps are good, some aren’t. Some weapons are overpowered and will be spammed, some suck and won’t ever be used. For the life of me I’ll never understand why the human forces in Halo would mass-produce an assault rifle that takes a whole clip to kill an enemy. Bottom line there really isn’t anything new in Halo 3. The multiplayer suite is rounded out by a fully featured cinema mode and the Forge map editor, good stuff to be sure but nothing PC gamers haven’t had for years.
Halo 3 is a lot like buying a Little Caesar’s five-dollar pizza. It’s a lot of pizza for the price, but it’s also kind of bland. Halo 3’s greatest selling point is just how much of it there is. The single player, 4 player co-op, the multiplayer, the extra online components, all come together to make the game worth buying. It’s a classic case of quantity justifying a certain lack of quality.
Next Victim: Killzone 2
Note: I am an equal opportunity offender. I do not pick on games because they are exclusive, because I don’t like them, or because my editors request it. I roast games solely according to their level of hype and because I am the destroyer of dreams.
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