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20 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Fun first time around but pales, 3 Oct 2009
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
I'm a huge Halo fan and I did enjoy playing this game first time around. However it has a number of flaws. The basic structure is pretty good with the city-based Rookie missions leading to the larger flashback main missions. The problem is that even for Bungie this has a very repetitive feel to it. The Mombassa streets Rookie missions are virtually identical and the novelty of night vision and new etc soon wears off as you wander endlessly in the dark looking for clues to the whereabouts of your team. The hidden weapons caches behind shuttered fronts are a big help in those missions.
The main missions are a bit more varied but each one has a similar theme with almost identical large arena gladatorial shoot-out endings where you battle huge numbers of enemies and wraiths. Its all a bit frantic and although I've played through twice (normal/heroic) I dont feel driven to play again and again like with Halo 3.
I think the graphics leave something to be desired, especially when the night vision is on as everything has a 2-D cartoon quality. There is also no recognizable "Halo storyline" to this and apart from the weapons and the enemies you wouldn't know it was a Halo game.
Firefight is a good addition but nowhere near as good as GOW2 horde and is limited in a couple of ways. Firstly teamplay is limited to friends and (I could be wrong about this), there is no restart option to resume at a wave level, I could only see you can start from the beginning each time. I haven't played online (no XB Live) but again you dont get the GOW2 option of playing multiplayer locally with team and enemy AI.
All in all a reasonable game but not up to the standard of other Halo games, nor of recent competition.
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25 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Really good shooter, 22 Sep 2009
Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars
I was playing this all yesterday from my shopto delivery and have to say the game is a great change. The plot takes the viewer to a time where the covenant are attacking Earth on a city called New Mobassa. You intially start as a rookie ODST trooper whos pod crash lands off course. From heere and through flashbacks you peice together what happened during the 6 hours you were out cold. This lets you play as the other ODST troopers untill you solve the whole mystery surrounding New Mobassa.
Graphically similar to Halo 3 but with a much different approach and with a few new parts. You have to find health as a pose to regenerating it (your just a human not Master Chief), your visor can act as a low light vision and enemy detector (appear with red outline). Your not near as quick as Master Chief and you have to take cover a lot and play each enviroment to your advantage.
The game is set into two discs (single player, multiplayer)and I haven't got round to playing the second disc, although I did play some Firefight, the new mutplayer mode. Here you have to take on waves of enemies which grow stronger each round, similar to horde on Gears of War 2, but this is more varied as different skulls are activated during each round to mix up the gameplay.
Overall Halo3:ODST is a great stop gap before Halo Reach (or any other shooter i.e. Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2) and for £29.99 you get a great 360 exclusive that I recommend to any gamer.
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27 of 36 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Nice add on pack, crap full priced game, 11 Oct 2009
Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars
I recently played through Halo ODST and really, come on now, we were all more than a bit ripped off here, weren't we?
Microsoft said the game would be an add on campaign that took around 4 hours or so to finish and (Most crucially), WOULD NOT be a full priced retail release. Then they changed their minds and said it WOULD be a full priced retail release, but the game had gotten a lot bigger since it's announcement. Fair enough, lets wait and see.
Game comes out, I fire it up and play through it on normal, and it takes me just under 5 hours to do so, and a LOT of that time is spent in the utterly pointless "open world" hub that you use to access the main missions (Even though there is nothing 'open world' about it, as it's just big areas that inevitably funnel you toward the same exits with no actual control over mission order or anything else that would constitute any other 'open world' game structure you'll be used to by now). The hub city is annoyingly dark, and your 'night vision' visor makes little difference beyond putting coloured outlines around enemies when you get close enough, and to be honest, the visuals in this game look really dated throughout. Halo 3 was never the best looking game, but still using it's engine today is really quite lazy.
The missions themselves are a mixed bag, with some being quite fun and engaging, and some being typical shooting gallery point A to B affairs, and overall there's little time to really get into the story of the game (Such as it is). There is some excellent voice acting, and the soundtrack is quite superb though, but there's no getting away from the fact the story simply isn't that good, and the climactic gameplay sequences are really really bad. I was genuinely shocked that the game was over when I saw the credits roll. It really does just cut you off with no warning.
Single player aside, multiplayer is pretty disgraceful. There's a single new multiplayer mode on the first disc, but then you have a second disc which literally just repackages all of the Halo 3 multiplayer content with a couple of new maps and nothing else. if you already have Halo 3 and want ODST you are literally FORCED to rebuy a large chunk of a game you already have, which effectively means ODST has practically NO multiplayer element of it's own, and you aren;t even given the option of only purchasing the newer game content if you already own Halo 3. That's nothing short of despicable.
Halo ODST is probably the worst Halo game to date. It isn't that it's a downright BAD game per se, but it's certainly very pedestrian, and for such a short game it utilises a lot of 'filler' elements to make it seem bigger than it actually is (Lots of walking between missions to draw things out for example), and then of course, the multiplayer that you will in all likelihood have already paid for once already when you bought Halo 3.
Basically, this is a heavily padded piece of downloadable content trying to justify itself as a full game, and in doing so it fails quite miserably, as there is simply no justification for making people pay for the same thing twice for such a small amount of actual new content for the retail price being asked.
But, this being a Halo release, most of you probably won't need to know anything beyond the name of the game before you empty your wallets. Good luck to you if you're satisfied by that, but I am not. Not by a long shot. I want the rest of the game content I paid for.
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