Fox's Review: Halo 3 (360)

[Fusion]

Journey to the 26th Century or so, well... It's at least some point in the future.  Where every SPARTAN is considered a valuable asset, and anything alien is something you must kill.  It's been heralded as one of the best FPSes of all time, and STILL goes for $30-40 retail.  But is it really deserving of such a title?  Is Master Chief that much of a badass?  Or is it all just a Star Wars effect*?

Graphics (8/10):

Well, gotta give it to Bungie here.  To fans of the Halo series itself, this game's graphics are said to not be that much greater than Halo 2's, and I could see where they were coming from.  Sure there's detailing out the arse, but its all for naught when you realize that you're not going to be staring at the muscular structure of a Covenant Elite and instead be filling them with bullets.


Sound (6/10):

I kind of find it hard to believe how a hair dryer can pass for the lower RPMs of an all-terrain "vehicle".

Outside of that, every weapon has a unique sound to it, makes them easily identifyable, and the sound system implementation isn't all that bad either.  Quite a few times I've been able to locate someone just by listening to where the sound was coming from.  The music?  Eh... It got kind of repetitive towards the end, using the same exact chords..


Story (4/10)

Is it just me, or does Master Chief have the personality of a brick?  For a hero so respected among the gaming masses, he is about as dull as they come.  He has a lot of involvement, but the Arbiter even has more of a notable personality than the Chief does.  Hell, everybody has a better personality.

Also, how is Johnson a badass if 9 times out of 10, he needs to be saved?   Also Cortana and other things, instead of playing through the game and trying to be one of those tough guys who thinks they've been to war, just look at the endings on YouTube.  Confused?  Yeah, that's how I was through the entire game.  Since when did killing aliens need to be laced with pesudo-religious crap?   I digress, but still.


Gameplay (4/10)

NOTE: This concerns the core gameplay and multiplayer features, Grifball is excluded from this.

My biggest gripe is with the Multiplayer.  Not that there are a bunch of idiots on XBL, but rather that Bungie chose to make a good portion of the modes require the pay DLC maps.  If you don't have the DLC you're restricted to one game type only in effect.  

Next comes the physics... If you could call them that.  Ragdoll, so what?  The vehicle physics are annoying as hell.  The Warthog and all other wheeled vehicles tend to jump around all over the place, kind of annoying when I'm trying to race through 50 different kinds of gunfire.  It gets to the point that avoiding being thrown around by your own vehicle's suspension is impossible.

As for the gameplay... What can I say?  There is no way in hell that a game this "great" can make someone so pissed off that they'd start screaming obscenities.  There's no way this game can be great if the game does no form of balance checking and ends up stacking the skilled players against the newbs.  There's no way this game can be great if lag accounts for 3/4ths of "skill" kills.  I'm not whining here, Halo suffers from many of the same flaws as Quake 3 engine games when it comes to lag, except players lagging out instead take the whole server with them in their lag.


Overall (5.5/10):

Most sequels exist to please fans of an existing fanbase, this was made to simply cash in on the franchise and Master Chief's vague appeal as some kind of modern Chuck Norris.  Usually the third of most franchises are the best in the series, I hardly see how this is Halo's shining moment.  You could say that I'm out of the target audience, but really... I hardly see how this game has a target audience.  Maybe that's the source of it's mass appeal, it's ambiguity to any known cliche.

But when your main character has the personality of a rock, and nothing else really has any notable character whatsoever, I kind of find it hard to attach myself to a game like this.