How far did you get: One completion
You may be wondering why I'm reviewing Halo 3 in 2013. Until now, I had never played a Halo campaign to completion. I was going to start with Halo 4, but I decided to try to get caught up with the story a little before I gave Halo 4 a shot. Boy oh boy, was that mistake. The campaign in this game is terrible.
Let's start with how it looks. Halo 3 has not aged well at all. I'm sure it wasn't designed to be played on a 46 inch 120hz 1080p HD television, but I feel like the stats on my television only amplified how bad it looks. This game came out after Bioshock did, and it looks miles worse. Occasionally, the loading screens would stop you for several seconds, not letting you pass. I don't know if this just shows how far developers have learned these consoles, but time has not been a friend to Halo 3.
The story is confounding. I had no idea what was going on, why I was where I was, or how I got there for more than half the game. Towards the end, things started making a bit more sense, but I wasn't particularly glad it was. Halo 3 is campy in the worst way. There are scenes where it will show Master Chief and make a horn noise, like "tada, here he is!" He dies in the end. Some badass he was.
One of things a lot of Halo fans like to say is that Halo is so much better than Call of Duty, because it's sci fi and different. I have news for you. Halo 3 is Call of Duty in space. It's exactly the same kind of game. It's a squad based shooter, just like Call of Duty. Most of the game, you run around listening to military guys shouting orders at each other. Does that sound familiar? To beat all, the story is Halo is harder to follow and the combat isn't as tight. You can tout that stupid floaty jumping mechanic all you want, it sucks.
The enemies in Halo 3 take far too many shots to take down, and it's never apparent when you're actually hitting your enemy. They make no type of animation to give you any hint they're actually being hurt, except maybe a small blood splatter. In some parts of the game, you're fighting a swarm type enemy, and you're actually supposed to run through and not try to kill all of them. At least, I presume that was the case. The game didn't tell me that was what I was supposed to do, but there were far more of them than I was going to be able to handle.
I would say the campaign was far too short at just over 4 hours, but I couldn't have been happier to be done with it. After my main character died and I watched the least emotional ending I've ever seen in a video game, I'm not even sure I want to even attempt Halo 4. The only reason I'm going to is because another developer made it. I can't believe people bought an Xbox 360 to play this game.
Rating: 40/100
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