An overwraght, overhyped dinosaur
Halo was a landmark Xbox game. It was fun and played well for a console FPS. But it wasn't perfect -- and Halo 3 keeps many of those imperfections alive and well.
Halo 3 continues the series staple of having a terrible story, and taking it far too seriously. Thankfully the story this time dispenses with most of the boring look into Covenant politics and religion that bogged down Halo 2. Sadly, it doesn't rid itself of many of the other legacy sins from past Halo games.
On several occasions, the game attempted to have 'meaningful' story moments -- but the fell flat due to their poor execution. But then again, this is a game with a giant plant monster called the 'Gravemind'. You shouldn't really expect a good story here.
The level designs are generally good looking, but they suffer from constant reuse -- this is the third Halo game, and you will see the same settings as before -- outdoor hilly areas! Plains! That same Forerunner architecture! The Forerunner/Covenant areas suffer from being both repetitive and hard-to-navigate. When you're in your fourth large, empty room with no clear purpose other than to be an arena for a fight, it's kinda easy to get lost.
The game seems content to leave you without guidance quite often. Instructions on what to do next will commonly be given in a line of dialog that you didn't hear as you were in a firefight. Oh, you turned on subtitles? Too bad only cutscenes are subtitled -- now you have no idea where to go or what to do. That is, until the game has decided that you've been lost long enough and pops up a checkpoint marker on screen to lead the way. This leads to many instances of you running around confused until the marker appears. Then you go to the marker and wait again.
Another piece kept from Halo 1 is the terrible checkpointing system. There is no way to tell when the game will checkpoint. So if you randomly die at full health because an AI team-member ran you over at full speed, then you could have lost several minutes of progress. Additionally, if you quit the game you can only resume at one of perhaps 4 major checkpoints per level. Played 20 minutes past the last major checkpoint and quit? Have fun playing those 20 minutes over again when you load.
I realize this game is from 2007, so I won't be too harsh on the graphics. The architecture and environments generally look good, but the human character models are terrible -- especially the faces.
The sound effects are great, but the music is repetitive. There are 3 or 4 easily identifiable music tracks that are played too often, the chief offender being the Halo theme. You can tell when the developers thought that some sequence was going to be awesome, because they decided to play that theme at full blast. It's not subtle, it just makes you go "Oh, so this is supposed to be 'epic'. Got it." That goes the same for the cloying piano music that pops up when the game tries to be 'emotional'.
And to top it off, it wouldn't be a Halo game if it didn't include a obnoxious ending featuring a over-long level featuring the boring Flood and a dumb Warthog race-against-the-clock sequence. You would have thought that Bungie would have learned something from the response to the Library and Flood in Halo -- but no, they just doubled down on the worst elements of Halo.
Halo 3 feels like a dinosaur. Bad checkpointing, a bad story, a player character that floats when he jumps and runs at 3 miles per hour. It's not a good game, and just ends up feeling like a parody of Halo by the end.
