Halo 3

The story of arc of Halo 3 continues from the comic series Halo: Uprising, which most of us in India never got to see. On second thought, the story of the game alone is sufficient to hold one’s interest-so you don’t need to know the story of the Halo series to play the game.

The initial part of the story is the usual boring Halo saga with huge choral and orchestral music backing the glory of the great Spartan 117 Master Chief. It is only after playing for almost an hour that something different happens. That’s when the story starts gripping you, which is something that did not happen in the other two installments. This is probably the only version of Halo that actually has an engaging storyline that gives you sweaty palms as it progresses. The heat of the action is heavily present now and the glory finally shows. You keep providing resistance against the Elites and have a range of environments to fight your battles in. You have your teammates accompanying you all the time, and game. Then, suddenly, the story becomes a survival horror and all the things you were warned about come to smack you in the face. We don’t want to spoil the fun here, so we want elaborate further on the story.

The gameplay has been tweaked in lo of ways; there have been weapon enhancements, and almost all the weapons from the previous games are still there, albeit with slightly modified power and firing rates. We tried to break the game’s flow a few times, but there were systems in place to take care of this. One such situation was when our game got automatically saved at a point when a fatal shot was fired at our character. We were getting hit by the shot, dying, and spawning again. This sequence repeated about eight times, but then the game corrected the error on it’s own by loading an earlier save point to fix this problem.

On the multiplayer side, many options in the game are tied to the Xbox Live network and only when it is available in India will we get to see the full potential of the game. The community features are extend to a theatre function that allows players to record their games, share them with their friends and broadcast them through Xbox Live. The multiplayer mode is where the game shows it’s full potential. However, in India, this mode is only available through the Campaign, Custom Game and Forge modes. Up to four players can play using split-screen modes on a single console; additional players can join in using System Link with 16 being the maximum number of players allowed. System Link can also allow players without sharing a screen, allowing them to keep their strategies to themselves.

The Forge mode is quite cool and enables map editing on the fly even as the game is going on. Map editing is mostly concerned with adding and moving spawn points, weapon locations, power-ups, the location of vehicles, etc. There is no way to edit the map geometry or add custom models and meshes. You can edit the map before the game starts, and specific players can be given the rights to edit maps while the game is on.
While the players are editing elements in the map, they are vulnerable to attacks because they freeze and are not able to move. These edited maps can be saved on the console for use in future multiplayer games both online and offline. These maps can also be uploaded to the bungie.net site when Xbox Live service becomes available in India.

The custom game mode comes with nine modes including CTF, Slayer, Oddball, King of the Hill, Assault, Territories, Juggernaut, Infection, and VIP. All these also have submodes with minor tweaking to the gameplay to add more variety. For example, in Slayer we could play a free-for-all game, team slayer as a team death-match mode, or even specify rockets as the only weapon in the game.

The campaign mode is also a lot of fun and allows you to play the story mode with up to four players, who play as Master Chief, the Arbiter, and the elites N’tho ‘Sraom and Usze ‘Taham. The mode is very well made and it actually feels like being out there in the field with an ally. If your partners are really good at riding the turret on a Warthog, impaling Brutes all around will be a fun way to spend a few weekends. All the usual connection modes also work in the campaign mode and when playing with three players, The first player gets the top half of the screen and the other two have to share the bottom half. A problem that we faced here was that the game refuses to run in the Widescreen mode with split screen enabled. Bungie has confirmed that the game doesn’t render at full 720p, and only displays a resolution of 1152x720 pixels; it’s just the upscaling engine on the Xbox that feeds 1080p displays. From what we saw, the game has superb HDR effects in all levels. However, the foliage in the game looked quite poor, as is common in other games on the Xbox platform.

Verdict
The game is a Big leap in the terms of it’s storyline, and it is surely much more engaging than whatever we have seen from Halo universe till now, I thoroughly enjoyed myself while playing this game in the Single Player mode but feel that Multiplayer is still the way to go. The way the story plays out and the levels are designed, we are sure gamers will have a lot of fun with this release.


For: Excellent multiplayer mode, the forge mode is really cool addition, the story is more engaging than the previous installments.


Against: None