Halo 3: Teh Epic Review (for realz this time!)
Well, after a long wait, I was finally able to type up the Halo 3 review (some of) you (may) have been waiting for. So I present to you, this thing…
In a word, Halo 3 is big, really big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is, and so on. Upon starting Halo 3’s singleplayer, I was pumped and ready to go for the final installment of the (probably) award winning franchise. I find myself lost in the beautiful environments, the cunning enemy AI, and the engaging story, until I blink, and it’s all gone. Halo 3’s campaign is very short, about 11 or so hours to be exact. From the moment I became conscious and ready to kick some Brute ass, ‘till the time when I breathed out in relief after (kind of) stopping the Covenant armada, the whole game was an action packed thrill ride, but for only a short time.
The game is very replayable, however, and will have you spending hours finding human skulls which some psycho maniac hid from you for some weird reason, and when you collect them, as in some kind of cult theory, the laws of physics are completely fucked up around you (probably because the skulls were some kind of alien burial-ritual thing, etc.).
Playing co-op has it’s ups and downs: The good thing is that you get to play singleplayer with up to four of your “friends”, but the negative of this is that once you turn on campaign scoring, everyone starts going berserk for kills and starts killing themselves, which is really really frustrating if you’re trying to collect skulls, especially if everyone is going ahead of you to the next checkpoint as you call out “Hold on, I’m getting a skull!” as you get warped to the next section of the level, which is even more frustrating.
Speaking of playing with random, annoying little kids who don’t know how to listen or shut up, the multiplayer ads even more to the ‘base’ 11 hours of singleplayer gameplay. Matchmaking has been greatly improved from Halo 2, what with the new veto system, and most importantly the ability to silence annoying little teenagers who keep humping your corpse (even if you got killed outside of the level in Snowbound. I’ve seen it happen!) and telling you to “get raped”. The interesting thing about Halo 3’s many online functions is custom game variants, a way to, er, customize the game variants.
After you get tired of playing multiplayer and killing annoying little kids, you might want to do it again in style. What I mean by in style is that in the Forge map editor, the number of ways you can kill people has greatly increased, be it creating fusion coil waterfalls, or dropping tanks on people. In the Forge, after you’ve finished dropping fusion coils on each other, you can actually edit the map (*gasp!*). Combine the infinite customizability of the Forge with the infinite customizability of custom game variants (the word ‘custom’ is going out of style), and you have the ability to tweak the settings so much that you may just end up with something along the lines of “Barbie Horse Killing Baby Raping Adventure”, or even “Journey to the Center of the Land of Pickled Machine Guns”, or something like that.
I don’t want to spend that much more time on this review, so I’m going to make the conclusion short, sweet, and to the point, much like a shoe polishing Grunt: The conclusion to this review is buy Halo 3. The end…
