Halo ODST
I’m going to preface this review with the fact that I am not a Halo fan, that doesn’t mean I hate the series; I’m just not enamored with it. My purchase history of the Halo series is spotty at best, with Halo and Halo 3 being the only two I purchased. Halo 2, Halo Wars, Halo: ODST and Halo: Reach were all either given to me or I Gamefly’d them. Now I am not saying all this to excuse my forthcoming review, I’m saying it so I can tell you I can see the games for what they really are, warts and all.
Halo: ODST puts you in the role as the new guy (Cliché 1) in a squad of Orbital Drop Ship Troopers. The Covenant have just invaded New Mombasa on Earth and you are going to jump down on top of a ship and take it out, even though your told it’s a suicide mission everyone is ready to do it (Cliché 2). However at the last moment a hard bitten Naval Intelligence Officer comes in and changes their orders (Cliché 3), but doesn’t tell them what those new orders are (Cliché 4). Your squad commander is angered by this, but since it’s obvious he has had a romantic relationship with this Officer in the past (Cliché 5) he decides to take it lying down.
What I just described to you is the first five minutes of the game, and it exemplifies the entire ODST experience. It’s a game at odds with itself; on one hand it was to be a departure from the Halo formula of old. It was to invigorate the franchise now that Master Chief was out of the equation and show people that a Halo game could work with out you playing a Spartan. However, it cant even escape trotting out the same old tired clichés that the game industry and Hollywood has been trotting out for decades (and doing it badly), so it should come as no surprise to you that anything it tried that was new is drowned by its namesakes (Halo) trappings.
The first change Bungie made was to make you feel like a vulnerable human, you don’t have the Mjollnir armor or super human agility and strength to help you. Take a few shots and your dead, leaving you running from cover to cover to take care of business. That’s right, a game built around running at your enemy shooting them till their shields drop so you can melee them to death… has been shoehorned into stop and pop mold, where the enemies have shields.
I found myself constantly running out of ammo in long drawn out firefights, mostly because the majority of Halo weapons are not made for accuracy. Tell me how great it is to play a stop and pop with out the ability to “zoom in” aim, snap to cover and a gun that might land one out of every five shots at range. Bungie changed the very fiber of the game, but didn’t give you the tools to properly play it. Add in shields, numbers and invulnerable “drop shields” that the enemies have and you will be left hunting for ammo a lot, or dying a lot… or both.
The reason Bungie felt they could make this change of course is that you are part of a squad here, a group of rough and tumble soldiers sent in to where things get hairy. Too bad that the only mission you are with your entire squad is the last one (and even there you are forced to do things alone), and you spend the majority of the game wandering the city alone. It’s even worse when you take into account the AI spends most its time finding new and inventive ways to stare at walls, so the seven times you have a buddy there to help you they are virtually useless.
Speaking of the city, it serves as a hub map that you wander around in to get from story mission to story mission, scattered around this map are Covenant, audio logs and not much else. I am going to assume the audio logs are supposed to be the carrot that drives me to explore the city, but like most the game they drip with clichés and poor voice acting, so coupled with the ammo situation and being alone I stopped exploring for these. Eventually I got a Mongoose and just sprinted from story mission trigger to story mission trigger, bypassing the hub world as much as possible.
As long as you can stand being able to predict everything the story throws at you and some lame, but funny zingers, the story is passable. Giving you enough variety to keep things interesting, and in a first for a Halo game, never wearing out its welcome. Though someone needs to explain to me why there is a giant hive under a city on Earth filled with Covenant aliens, especially since the Invasion just started that day. Or if it’s not Covenant aliens, then why some giant insect species on Earth has Covenant plasma pistols.
Overall ODST survives souly on its namesake. If Halo was not attached to it in anyway I doubt I would have even played it, and there was and still is zero reason to play this games multiplayer as that Halo 3 existed when it launched and people had already built up their ranks there and at least I didn’t see Firefight as a compelling reason to abandon Halo 3, and Reach with ODST’s firefight mode exists today.
Graphically speaking the game falls short in most ways, with a major part of the game taking place in dark areas to force you to use their new VISR system, which is like a hybrid augmented reality display and night vision. However when in this mode things tend to become slightly indistinct; leaving you to rely on the Tron like outlining of everything to guide you around in the dark. Along with that; textures, most notably on characters faces, are muddy and repetitive.
Voice acting is hit or miss across all major characters, Nathan Fillon of Firefly and Serenity voices Buck the leader of your merry band, and can really come off flat and stilted in some scenes while Tricia Helfer of Battlestar Galatica as “Dare” is almost uniformly bad through out the game. This happens through out and can really pull you out of the scenes you are watching.
Finally the design of the Hub map is just plain terrible. I get what they were trying to do with the thing, but it’s filled with dead ends, loops and a map that shows the buildings in 3D, covering up many important passages leaving you unable to easily find your way to where you need to be. To top this off as I mentioned previously, the textures are repetitive and there are virtually no distinguishing land marks, and because of this getting lost happens a lot. So the only reason the hub world exists is to get you from one mission to another (besides the audio logs there is zero story to be found in the hub world) and that one function it serves it does poorly.
Really what it comes down to is that Bungie didn’t make this either enough Halo or enough ODST, instead putting too much of both in to make this a truly great game. If you’re a Halo fan you should give this a whirl, if not for the story then for the things it’ll unlock in Reach. Everyone else would probably be better served looking else where for a first person shooter.
