Oh Dear, ST
I have been a fan of the Halo series since combat evolved arrived on my, now retired, PC, and so thought it my duty to try this stand alone expansion out for myself. I completed it in two modest evening sessions on Co-Op with a friend on legendary difficulty, and also tried my hand at the new, co-op friendly, Firefight mode.
In a nutshell, ODTS’s campaign is essentially one flashback after another, as you play the speechless character, imaginably dubbed, The Rookie, who wakes up after a 6 hour snooze after crashing his drop pod into the side of a building. With not a teammate in sight and the city around you in ruins, you stagger from one end of the city to the next, picking up random objects which seemingly have the power to give you lengthy, omniscient, and player controlled flashbacks of what your teammates were up to while you were busy sucking thumb in your impact-induced power nap.
When ODST is detached from its own hype and overwhelmingly successful franchise name, it is ultimately a fairly standard run & gun shooter, but often seems at odds with its own identity, as while the controls, and game mechanics are undoubtedly still Halo, the situations and environment The Rookie finds himself in, at least in the first of the game, feel too quiet, too small and too restrained even for a suspense/horror shooter, let alone a Halo game.
Few need to be told that Halo, at its core, is an action game which prides itself on its no nonsense run & gun combat, its hectic encounters, and it’s huge and spacious environments. So the frequent attempts at scaling this down to some kind of gritty, humanised, thriller just comes off as half-arsed and unimaginative.
The lack of the fun in the copy and paste city environment is not helped by the blinding darkness, which forces you to remain in a night vision mode pretty much all the entire time that you’re within the city, which in addition to brightening everything up, also decorates every single inanimate object and every character in appropriately coloured outlines. Needlessly to say, this force fed function wears out its welcome fairly quickly, as does the constant red haze that invades your screen whenever you so much as cough hard.
ODST is at its best when it drops its shallow System Shock 2 Façade, and stays true to its roots; driving around chaotic battlefields on warthogs, jumping from moving banshees onto the slippery hides of covenant scarabs, or just holding out a fixed location against waves of enemies. Sadly these moments are fewer then some would have, and when the action reaches its crescendo, you soon find yourself back in dreary, uneventful present with The Rookie, who seems annoyingly indifferent to more or less everything that unfolds.
Most of you will already know that the multiplayer has been completely recycled from Halo 3, apart from an extra 3 maps, however, ODST does sport one new mode that’s worth a peak: Firefight. This is a concept that many a shooter fan should be familiar with; endless waves of increasingly harder enemies swarm your position and it’s up to you and your team to score as many points as possible before your shared life pool is depleted and the last man falls. The mode is a redeeming feature, as playing with a group of friends can be a blast, however, playing with friends is all you’ll be doing, as it suffers from the same inexcusably poor issue found in the co-op campaign mode: there is no lobby or matchmaking function. This makes it annoyingly difficult to play on a whim unless you plan to fly solo.
All in all, Halo: ODST is a fairly standard shooter that while not as thrilling as previous instalments, can still provide a good few hours of fun when taken lightly and played with friends. However, anyone expecting this to be a Halo 4, or even a really engaging story, will be disappointed.
