Firefly Meets Halo: Do the Shock Troopers Hit Their Mark?
The newest entry in the we-thought-it-was-over-with-the-third-one-but-were-wrong Halo game continues in the only direction the narrative has allowed it: in the past (in this case, somewhere in the middle of Halo 2 ). For those of you confused by the title, ODST is Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, a group of elite soldiers who are shot down onto a planet by a ship in orbit. But there isn’t much orbital dropping in this game. In fact, you drop once, during the opening sequence, and the rest of the time, you’re a POFST, a Planetary On-Foot Shock Trooper. To be fair, dropping onto the planet at the beginning is an exciting visual sequence, much as it was at the beginning of Killzone 2, and it gives the game a chance to show you some interesting visuals it has no opportunity to do so later.
Instead, much of your time will be in two areas: walking around the city of New Mombasa as the nameless, faceless “Rookie” and playing flashbacks as one of the other members of the ODST squadron. This is ODST’s biggest departure, structurally, from the Halo series, and it doesn’t always quite work.
The flashback sequences are a bit easier to explain. You play most of the game as a character known only as the Rookie who has been unconscious for about six hours after the drop. As you (you the Rookie and you the player) wander around the abandoned city of New Mombasa wondering where everyone is, you come across objects and artifacts that serve as triggers for missions that tell explain what happened during your snooze. These missions are essentially quasi-empathic flashbacks during which you play one of the rather forgettable members of the ODST squadron (Dutch, Mickey, Romeo, and the boss, Buck, played by Firefly’s Nathan Fillion). These are the very linear missions that Halo players know and have come to appreciate: get from point A to point B, pass some expendable red-shirts along the way, drive a vehicle or two (or three, but not much more than that), and get involved in a heck of a lot of full-on firefights. These sequences play as well as any Halo adventure to date.
The new innovation comes in the in-between missions, in which you (as the Rookie) hoof it (and rarely drive) across a nighttime version of the city of New Mombasa, which is now completely devoid of humans and has been overrun with roving, marauding bands of the Covenant, your multi-species alien enemy. During most of these sequences, you are trying to find your way from one beacon to the next, the site of an artifact that will launch the next mission. You will frequently be interrupted by bands of the Covenant, which you can engage (with varying success, depending on what spawns) or avoid altogether (giving the Halo franchise an actual stealth mechanic for the first time). You may also wish to find hidden audio logs throughout the city, which provide a back story of what happened when the Covenant first attacked New Mombasa, before you dropped. The entire city is draped in darkness, requiring you to use your helmet’s enhanced vision mode (which amplifies light and outlines objects with colored wireframes) to make your way around. In fact, trying to get around without the enhanced view is essentially useless—the game is far too dark—which will make you wonder, after a while, why the enhanced view isn’t just always on the inky New Mombasa city street sections.
One of the problems I’ve always had with the Halo games is that they don’t let you enjoy anything for very long, and this is especially true in ODST. Find a nice weapon like a flamethrower tucked away that you really like? Enjoy it now, because you’re never going to find more ammo for it. Love the vehicle driving sequences? They are mostly one-shot affairs. The nature of the Halo games is to require you to constantly change weapons, since the ammo is scarce (or non-existent for the really good ones), which for me sucks some of the fun out of having some impressive weaponry: you use it for three minutes and then are back with the lame pistol until you scavenge something better.
The other odd thing about ODST, in part by nature of its design, is that there is no typical video game progression. In most games, you get better weapons, face tougher enemies, and repeat. Here, you have most of the weapons and most of the enemies launching at you from the get-go, which just makes the levels cosmetically different but functionally fairly similar. It also requires a fair knowledge of the Halo universe so that you know that when a Hunter is lumbering towards you, you run.
But perhaps the most disappointing thing about ODST is that it doesn’t have much of a story. You set off on a mission that never fully gets explained (but makes more sense if you’ve played Halo 2 and 3), and you have to piece what back story there is by doing the flashback missions (be careful to do them in the right order, by the way) and finding the audio logs. The logs themselves drive me crazy: I prefer to have a narrative that is integrated into the gameplay, not one that I have to spend hours scavenging just to have it doled out to me in minute bits. It ruins to cohesion of the story, especially if you can’t find all of them, and it was the same beef I had against the otherwise enjoyable Bioshock. Credit goes to getting some interesting sci-fi actors, including nearly half the Firefly cast (Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, and Nathan Fillion, who gives Buck his own likeness as well) as well as Tricia Helfer. Nathan Fillion still really sounds like Firefly’s Malcolm Reynolds, though.
Adding to the story woes is that you never really get to know much about the characters and thus don’t have much investment in them, even though the game (especially with the Rookie’s loving examination of the artifacts to the swelling strings in the background) expects you to. Most of the information I got about the characters actually came from the “Desperate Measures” promo trailer that I downloaded from Xbox LIVE, in which Buck briefly introduces the characters. They all wear helmets and nearly identical armor most of the game, so even during the cutscenes, you’re sometimes left wondering who anyone is. And while I understand that the nameless, faceless main “Rookie” character is meant to have universal appeal, it seems more gimmicky (“What’s your name?” Whoops! We get interrupted again!) and breaks the narrative illusion. The only well-fleshed out characters are those in the audio logs, and you already know how I feel about those. At least Martin O’Donnell’s score is as compelling as ever (though I still maintain his work on Myth: The Fallen Lords was his best).
So did I enjoy anything about ODST? Absolutely, lots of it. Like Halo 3, it is a game that mostly begs to be played cooperatively, and some of the battles and set pieces are a great deal of fun. The driving sequence at the end (as in most Halo games) is frantic with a lot of interesting things happening in the background. But most of the game plays like Halo, so this is nothing new. If you enjoyed Halo 3, by all means play ODST. (If you haven’t played a previous Halo game, don’t start with ODST . You really won’t get it.) Just don’t expect anything new, and prepare yourself for a few steps backwards.
