Halo 3: ODST

The Short

Pros
-  All new single player set during Halo 2 but on earth
- Play as somebody other than Master Chief (finally)
- Handful of new weapons
- New Firefight mode
- Story is a very different approach than the other Halo games
- Nathan Fillion does a voice in it
- Includes a disc for the complete Halo 3 multiplayer experience

Cons
- Story is stale and doesn't pack promised emotional punch
- Firefight is friends only; no open matchmaking
- Not much different from Halo 3
- While it's nice to have a Halo 3 multiplayer disc with all the maps, it's still the same old multiplayer
 - Doesn't do much to expand the Halo mythology or improve the Halo formula
- Short; only a few hours long
- Graphics are in the Halo 3 engine and look dated
- Halo Reach basically made this entire game obsolete

Welcome to New Mombasa

The Long

Halo 3: ODST sparked a lot of talk leading up to it's release. Originally titled Halo 3: Recon, it was slated as a sort of discounted expansion pack to the original Halo 3. As it came closer to its release, however, Bungee announced they had added a significant amount to the game, and therefore would be charging full price for it. People were pissed, even though nobody had actually played the game yet. So, in the end, is Halo 3: ODST worth it, or is it just as we all thought: a glorified expansion pack?

Halo 3: ODST takes place during the events of Halo 2. While Master Chief and the Arbitor were off blasting aliens on other planets, back on Earth stuff was getting crappy. The Covenant showed up and started off an invasion, leading to most of the Earth getting blown up and Master Chief having to come back and save the day again (which is how Halo 3 starts). You assume the role of an unnamed rookie soldier who is a member of the ODST squad (which stands for Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, basically marines that drop in from orbit to kick butt), whose drop pod has a malfunction and results in him being knocked unconscious for most of the battle. The game is evenly split between playing as the rookie and as other members of your squad who, unlike you, actually landed and did useful stuff rather than sleep in their pod for several hours.

And your captain is Nathan Fillion. That's not the character's name, but I never bothered to learn it. 

As the rookie the game sort of turns into a weird, pseudo-open world experience, where you explore the ruins of the now-overrun New Mombasa and find objects relevant to the battles that your squadmates experienced a few hours previous. You then relive those experiences (which usually involve the standard Halo fare of riding vehicles, blasting dudes, and pressing "B" to melee) before jumping back into the rookie. Near the end of the story, it makes a (rather jarring) jump from the past to the present, where the squad reunites for the final battle and the game ends with the Covenant still blowing up the planet, but Master Chief about to show up. Yay; everything we did was for nothing!

Bungee pushed that this story was better than any of their others, and I can at least agree that it is different than the other Halo games. Halo has always been a power fantasy: you play a super-soldier who can jump ten feet in the air, duel-wield impossibly large guns and base enemies in the face or run them over in purple space jets. Because of this, the set-pieces have always been appropriately over-the-top and goofy. Compare the end of ODST, where you are essentially driving down a freeway (wee?) to the end of Halo 3, where you are driving across the surface of a crumbling planet as it explodes around you, making sweet jumps and finally launching your Warthog off the side of a ruined planet into the hanger bay of a spaceship. 

Yeah, I can make that jump, no sweat. 

This is what Halo is, and it's what Bungee is good at. They aren't good at hamfisted "emotional" stories or slow, plodding exposition. This is also evidenced in Halo Reach, which should have been the best Halo story ever, but instead ended up being incredibly boring and shallow, but this isn't a review of Halo Reach it's a review of Halo 3: ODST, so I'll shut up about that now. Point being: Halo 3: ODST plods along for most of the game, with the flashback action sequences a decent saving grace but still dwarfed by anything that happened in Halo 3. Because Bungee isn't that great at actual writing (especially dialogue), I never felt attached to any of the characters (besides the fact the main character was Nathan Fillion, and I kept pretending he was Mal from Firefly), and so I was never motivated to see what happened. The fact that the single-player is incredible short just seals the deal, leaving it as an interesting experiment but a failed one never-the-less.

So the single-player is unique but uninspired; what about the multiplayer modes? Halo has always been about it's super-hardcore multiplayer following, and on the surface ODST is everything you ever wanted. It comes with two basic modes: Firefight (which is on the ODST disc) and the complete Halo 3 multiplayer (which is on its own disc). Let's talk about Firefight first. 

Suffer not a beastie to live...wait, I said that in my Metro 2033 review. Oops. 

Firefight is basically Halo's answer to Gears of War's "Horde Mode." Basically you grab four human players, and you try and hold off wave after wave of computer-spawned baddies. Every few waves "skulls" are added, basically difficulty modifiers (giving enemies better grenade throws, better aim, more health, etc) to keep the whole thing from becoming a cakewalk. You have to stick together to survive, sharing health and weapons and ammo. It can get very difficult very fast, and it works like it did in Gears with the whole "frantic desperation to survive" once the battles really get heated.

It still has problems, though, first and foremost being there is no public matchmaking. At all. And since you are inexplicably limited to two people split-screen per box (unlike regular multiplayer, where you can have four people at once), you have to play online in order to get a full four player-team, meaning you need at least two actual friends to play with. Yeah, you could tell me to "go find some friends, loser" but having to get the crew together whenever we want to play is inconvenient and annoying. The fact they took this out for Halo Reach only proves they knew it was a bad idea, and makes this mode feel like some weird beta for that new, better version. 

The other problem is that it...just isn't particularly engrossing. I really got sucked into Gears of War 2's horde mode; I probably played it more than any other online shooter's multiplayer up to that point. But Halo 3: ODST's Firefight mode just seemed...basic. It was like they knew they should make a "Horde" mode (around this time everybody was doing it) but the only put the bare minimum into it. It's still decent, and if you have four people on system-link where you can scream at each other it's a hilarious blast, but when you tear it down to its core, Firefight on ODST is a really shoddy attempt. This is only further exacerbated by the fact that the Firefight mode in Halo Reach is really good, which again makes me think the whole Halo 3: ODST experience was Bungee experimenting before releasing their actual finished product a few years later.

I suck at Halo 3 multiplayer, but I still enjoyed playing it for some inexplicable reason

The other multiplayer experience is "The Complete Halo 3 Multiplayer Experience," which essentially means they took the same Halo 3 multiplayer you've been playing for years, throwing all the expansion maps on a disc, and calling it good. There is no actual new multiplayer with Halo 3: ODST. At the time it was released I had no problem with this; I owned Halo 3 but hadn't played the multiplayer much, and something I hate about console FPSes is the fact there never seem to be enough maps (unless you shell out like $50 for the expansions). So this disc was actually pretty awesome, if a bit basic. But if you were somebody who loved Halo 3 (which I'm pretty sure that's who Bungee was marketing this game to), then you probably owned the expansions already, meaning the whole "multiplayer" aspect of ODST was wasted on you.

I can't say much about Halo 3's multiplayer: either you love it or hate it. It's heavily weapons based with a hint of vehicular combat, allows for some totally nuts game modes and maps, and everybody on it is way the crap better than me. Regardless, if its your cup of tea then this is the best place to get it, though I'm going to tell you right now that Halo Reach's multiplayer is basically a billion times better.

Bungee still knows how to make a hell of a trailer, though

So...the verdict? Despite what I've said Halo 3: ODST isn't a bad FPS, it's just a bad Halo game. The standard of quality set by the series demanded better than what was given, and the lack of anything new in the multiplayer department (save a mediocre Firefight) really makes this package seem incomplete. Add to the fact that now, years later, I can look back and say Halo Reach did literally everything that Halo 3: ODST did but better, and I see no reason to pick this game up instead of that one. 

That being said, it is still an extremely solid shooter, because while the extra bits may fall short, the core of these Halo games is the shooting, and that holds up. Because of that, I'm going to tack on an extra point to my original two out of five score, giving it a final score of three out of five.

However, I really can't recommend buying it at this point in time unless you really love the Halo universe, have to own every game in the series, or think the Halo 3 multiplayer is somehow better than the Halo Reach multiplayer (it isn't). You can get the game pre-owned for $10, though if you love Halo you could probably go as far as $20. Just know that you are looking at the weakest entry in the Halo franchise. 

Oh look, now I've gone and made Mal sad. :(