Right, let's throw this out there right away. Halo 3's single player campaign is disappointing. There. Phew! Said it. For three good reasons I'll elaborate on in a minute. But before you frame letters to your MP, allow me to quickly qualify this and begin with a confession. I'm a card-carrying, bought-the-action-figure, tried-it-on-legendary, wasted-away-half-my-life-in-online-multiplay Halo saddo. Not read-a-Halo-novel mental, give me some credit, but you get the picture.
A couple of Halo 2 multiplay map favourites make a welcome return.
That doesn't mean I can't step out of my fanboy funk for a few hours and review a game objectively, that's how crusts are earnt round these parts, but on completing the single player mission, I quietly set down my controller, and found I was left slightly cold. And without sounding too childish, that's Halo's fault, not mine. The game's so big and unwieldly, the hype so planet-dwarfingly massive, the expectation so high, that I think any sane gamer's reaction when it doesn't turn out to be pound-for-pound the best game ever, is a tiny vacuum of empty in the pit of the stomach. And that's the problem with judging Halo. By any other PC or console standard this is exemplary gaming. By Halo's ridiculous, unattainably heavenly standards, it falls short. Don't panic, though. It gets gushy later.
Reason for single player disappointment one: It's too short. You'll gleefully stab that nipple-like X on your controller, select "normal" difficulty and play through to the homage-y final level and sombre final credits in around six hours if you're Halo proficient. And I'm not going to get into the whole game length debate, but by anyone's standards, this is too damn short. Crackdown? Eight to ten hours of nicely weighted and fun play. Bioshock? Around ten hours of story-led shooting. Halo? Almost half that. Boo…
Reasons for single player disappointment two: Graphically, it's underwhelming. Again, don't get me wrong, it's polished to today's required high def sheen, but Bungie has been a first party Microsoft developer for seven years now and is its Blue Ribband games constructor, so it's not unreasonable to expect this to be the eye candy graphical standard of the console. And Bioshock looks better. As does Heavenly Sword. God bless The Cell.
Forge means you can slap any item down anywhere in any level.
Reasons for single player disappointment three: The story is an unfathomable mess. Anyone have any clue whatsoever as to what occurred in Halo 2? Nope, us neither. Well Bungie carry on in that vein, with vital expositional dialogue covered over by explosions and music, alliances struck and undone with no real explanation and I'm sure I missed a couple of standout, blockbuster moments because I happened to be looking in the other direction. I know that cut-scenes are seen as slightly smelly gaming throwbacks nowadays, but if you want to push on a story, don't allow the player to wander off while your cranking up your exposition. Oh, and make sure you switch the subtitles on to make sure you take everything in.
Get through these disappointments, though, and you'll certainly crack through the single player with a smile on your face. It is pleasingly Halo 3.0, with the requisite smattering of new guns, new vehicles and new enemies. Much of the fighting is on a truly epic scale - there's an awesome boss battle (that for some reason the chaps at Bungie were refusing to acknowledge was a boss battle, Lord no) against a Covenant Scarab which hosts more AI-led individuals on screen - Covenant and Human - than the entire first level of the first Halo game. The 360 can crunch the kind of numbers to allow this to happen, and Bungie has absolutely exploited these resources to paint up some cracking set pieces on the Halo canvas. Microsoft politely asked us not to give away any plot spoilers, and we won't. If you want that, there are other corners of the interpipe, but I won't give too much away if I just say in passing you'll meet a few old friends and a few old enemies, too.
But restart after the closing credits and you get to the point of Halo 3. Multiplayer. In fact, it's no surprise really that the multiplayer feels like the true meat of this game. Bungie well knows which way the gaming wind's blowing, and the gusts it's picked up on are whooshing noisily towards the online, sandpit and community created direction. So there are four main parts of multiplay, each with their own particular brand of genius.
The first is your conventional multiplay battles. Different levels - big, small, medium-sized - team games, objective games, deathmatch games, you've done this before and you'll do this again. It shows how far gaming and Bungie has gone, that what felt hugely significant and earth shattering in Halo 2's multiplay now feels comfortably conventional. Halo 2 broke ludicrous online gaming records month on month. This will do the same. And it's surprising how blasé you can be, knowing that at doing this, Bungie is once again best in the business.
Four-player co-op is going to get very messy, especially when scored in metagame.
It's when you add the second main part that it becomes genius. There's a "Forge" option which turns every multiplay level into an infinitely tweakable sandbox. You can run around like a bog-standard conventional seven-foot-tall super soldier, but bash the D-pad up and you transform from Master Chief to Monitor, and are given the power to omnipotently zoom around the level and place anything, anywhere. Select items from the menu, place, step back and move again as you see fit. So if you just want to pile tanks like Stonehenge, start the level with a mad dash for a stack of rocket launchers or reckon that a shadowy corner could really do with a pointless, but nice looking PC monitor, knock yourself out. Tweak players, rules, spawn speed, spawn points, whatever, then save your level to Xbox Live. You can then fire it up and set two teams knocking seven bells out of each other while roaming around like some kind of modern day Dungeon Master, monkeying with teams/players/items at your Godly discretion. The possibilities are quite literally endless.
Then comes multiplay part three. Save movie. This is quite simply astonishing. You can pretty much record anything. Ever. Remember that spawny killtacular that you pulled off with a lucky grenade and last ditch, desperate button-bashing melee kill? Well you can revisit the multiplayer game you just completed, view it back in its entirety from your viewpoint, third-person behind you, another player's viewpoint or third-person behind them or just free camera. Still with us? Excellent. So frame your five seconds of Halo genius from any angle, record the cool clip of you going postal with all the grace of a John Woo movie, and then save it straight to Xbox Live. Tag it for your mates and they can see the playback when they log on. Now I'm no IT genius, but the server space this will require would boggle even Bill Gates's massive noggin. Extraordinary. And that doesn't even touch upon the possibilities this will throw up for fan-created machinima. Putting the tools into everyone's hands means this will explode like a nuke over Xbox Live and YouTube. You're not going to be able to spit for Halo 3 movies over the next couple of months.
One of the stand out Campaign moments is the face-off against this angry Scarab.
Which brings us to part four - co-op. Rainbow Six Vegas has done four player co-op before and it was ace, but Halo ratchets it up more than a few notches. You can play through the entire campaign online with four players. Vegas managed specially-created levels; Halo plays the same, entire game as single player, but with four people shooting the crap out of the Covenant. Want more? You got it. You can play this as a 'metagame' too, which scores everything. Kill a grunt and you garner points; do it with a head shot and they multiply. Pull off multiple kills with a grenade and the counter goes past like a one-arm bandit. The thing is, if you die before a checkpoint you lose the lot, plus if you kill your partner you're score takes a hammering. So you can imagine the scenes at the end of each level, with team-mates desperately throwing themselves on each other's grenades in a bid to score the most points. There's more, too: add video save and you'll be able to see the best Halo performers' vids by high score and see just how those gaming Jedi earnt their props. Absolutely, stupidly incredible.
Closing Comments
So let’s recap. Single player’s good, without question, but the sheer weight of hype alone brings inevitable disappointment. It would have had to have troubled the very best single-player games ever to reach for those highs but it doesn’t. But it all pales into insignificance against the tech-brimming majesty of the multiplay. Again, the conventional multiplay aspects would have left most reviewers a sweaty mess on their carpets, but Bungie’s innovations have pushed the boundaries on not only what multiplay does, but what multiplayer is. Shooting doesn’t seem to be the be all and end all, all of a sudden.
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