The “Break it Down” Blog

Ok here it is… my mini-review of Halo 3. I’ll keep this short and sweet, with most sarcasm aside and just try and give you the honest low-down on it.

1. SUCKS: It’s Halo 2 with bump mapping everwhere and some post-processing done on the image. If you want to tell me to fuck off and die and think it’s the best looking thing again, I’d urge you to get a labotomy. This game DOES NOT look that good. It looks like someone took Halo 2 and polished it to HELL, but it most certainly does not look as nice as Gears of War or BioShock. The hair alone on the characters is as ghetto as it ever was, straight poly’s with jagged textures of “hair” applied to it, moving in stiff deformations forward and back. It’s identical to how Halo 2 was.
2. COOL: Load sequences are very short, this is likely because of #1.
3. SUCKS: The animations are embarrassing. I’m not saying they are jerky, or bad… or mechanical… they are fucking flat-out embarrassing. These are the SAME animations from Halo 2, I’m not kidding. The stick-like running, the “bouncing” and mechanical flow of movements… it’s all here, and as far as I can tell from comparing, it’s identical (like they kept the same skeletons and animations)
4. COOL: Tons of voice-acting. You always hear the soldiers say something funny and pertinent to what you are doing. It is actually enjoyable. Like you shoot someone in the face and you’ll hear a guy behind you say something oh “Ohhh SHIT, that’s going to leave a mark” or something else to make you smile.
5. SUCKS: Story-telling is herky-jerky just like in 1 and 2 with useless back tracking. Even though I read there was little or no backtracking in this game, there is. For example “OK we made it to the escape pod…. OH SHIT, I dropped my keys! Master Chief, go back to the Loading Dock and get it for me!”, naturally, you cannot go back the way you JUST came, you have to go a DIFFERENT way, and on your way back you get to go a different way yet again… you know, so you don’t notice you are backtracking. What a stupid story mechanic…
6. COOL: Water looks sweet… it actually does, some nice bump-mapping effects and animations and sounds… shooting it is satisfying. Also the trees move when you bump them, that’s kinda cool.
7. SUCKS: Just like the reviews said, the AI of your friendly soldiers is mildly retarded. It’s not horrible, but it’s not as good as enemy AI.
8. COOL: Sounds are nice. High quality and nice polish to them. Here I mean all sounds, music, effects, background sounds, etc.
9. SUCKS: Weapon sounds are super unsatisfying. This is a preference thing, but the sounds of the machine guns are so synthetic and not poppy at all like a real machine gun or explodey sounded with muscle to it. It’s that same hum-drum fluid sputtering ratatata that has no punch to it.
10. COOL: There are a lot of vehicles. Not just variety… but a lot to choose from. Like in one scene, I think there were 8 vehicles driving around. I jumped onto each one and bashed the shit out of it with my melee attach (B).

SINGLE PLAYER SCORE: 5/10, there is nothing impressive here.

MULTIPLAYER SCORE: 9/10, there is a ton of content here and functionality (co-op is a blast!)

FINAL SCORE: 7/10, there is nothing revolutionary about this game. It’s Halo… all over again, regurgitated down to the last drop, but luckily with such robust multiplayer it’s got a lot of value to it for the $60. If you have friends to play it with, I think this could be a really fun game, if you just want a really good FPS to play by yourself, forget this, get BioShock and wait for Mass Effect to come out!

Update #1: Ha, I’m not the only one that things Halo 3 is just “Halo 2 in HD“.