Halo 3 First Playthrough (via MCC)
1It's time to see what a generational upgrade does for the Halo series - not to mention a rare instance where the dev team was perhaps not under egregious amounts of crunch for a change.
I'd already been pretty blown away by the visual upgrade even between 1 and 2 within the same generation; I shouldn't be surprised that the jump from 2 to 3 is gigantic by comparison. I think what I was more surprised by was how much I was getting CoD or Crysis vibes from the environments in early parts of the game - I felt like I was playing a game that wasn't Halo, but had Halo weapons and enemies thrown in.
Another thing that surprised me was...bloom. Oh no, they discovered bloom. And apparently enemies can also deploy flares which turn your screen solid white for 3 seconds. Anyway, the game looks very good when it's not trying to sear my retinas.
Speaking of flares, a feature new to this game is a separate equipment slot, for things like deployable shields/bubbles, flares, cloaking, and apparently even invincibility. I would probably have enjoyed this more if the items were labeled in the HUD at all times. Unfortunately, the name is only shown when you pick it up - which I never realize I'm doing unless I'm consciously replacing one with another by pressing a key - otherwise there's only an icon, and I have no idea what the icons mean. I suppose this is no different than grenades (of which there are also 2 new types), but grenades are far more frequently replenished than these new items so there's less cost to finding out the hard way. To make matters worse, you use the same button to swap equipment item as you do to swap weapon, and the two have very similar prompts that are easy to confuse. This entire new feature felt more frustrating than interesting, thanks to awful UI design.
One thing I was happy to be less confused by in this game was the plot. We're no longer subjected to whiplash from repeatedly bouncing back and forth between two different characters' perspectives and trying to comprehend multiple Covenant factions. Halo 3 is still as rich in cutscenes as Halo 2 was, but it felt easier to follow this time around, for the most part, and seems to make a much more concerted effort to tie things up at the end - though that isn't to say they didn't still leave the series wide open for another installment.
This certainly feels like it might be the strongest installment yet - but it's also the shortest so far, to my disappointment. I've been wondering if the campaigns might get beefier as we go along, but it seems that the opposite is happening, and I would guess that Halo 3: ODST won't buck the trend, being an offshoot...
00:00 - Intro
04:00 - Game start