Halo 3: ODST

The junkie and the halo...

Spin offs to popular franchises rarely work, especially in games.  People fall in love with the characters, environments and quirks of the originals, so when their beloved series makes a change in direction, the fans get scared and confused, and start huddling together and crying softly in each other’s warm embrace. And so enters Halo 3: ODST, a spin-off and change in direction for the popular Halo series.

ODST begins moments after the events at the end of Halo 2, and with everyone’s favourite armour-clad space marine off chasing the Covenant, players get to see the action through the eyes of the equally mute Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, the Rookie.  After deployment you are knocked unconscious and wake up six hours later to find that your squad mates are missing.  So you begin exploring the ruined city of New Mombasa searching for clues as to what happened to them.

Within the first five minutes of wandering around the desolate nighttime streets of New Mombasa you will immediately notice how different ODST is from the previous Halo games.  Obviously the sandbox city and the awesome new silenced weapons are brand new, as is the nighttime setting, which logically gives rise to the next feature – the night vision mode.  As it helps greatly when spotting health, weapons and enemies it is far too easy just to leave the visor on all the time, but doing so would mean that you would miss the dark new visual aesthetic.

While traversing the sizable city you will occasionally stumble across clues as to what happened to your fellow squad mates.  Once you pick one of these plot advancing items the Rookie flashes back to the perspective of one of the other ODSTs as you get to play through the events that transpired while you were napping in your landing pod.  These daytime flashback levels play more like the Halo we know and love and actually break up the nighttime sandbox action quite nicely.

On the multiplayer front, and let’s face it, it wouldn’t be a Halo game without some multiplayer, there is plenty of it.  Along with the classic Halo online modes, ODST introduces a brand new mode – Firefight, where up to four players are pit against increasingly harder waves of enemies in a similar fashion to Horde mode in Gears of War 2.

One of the best things about ODST is the voice cast, and any fans of the brilliant TV show Firefly will agree that the reunion of Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk is cause for celebration, perhaps by smoking cigars and shooting off flare guns into the night sky.  The crew of Serenity add a much need personality into the game, and much more importantly lets you empathise with the characters.  Oh, and Number Six from Battlestar Galactica lends her voice to the new commander.

So while the game itself is mostly great, it does have a few big flaws, namely that the story doesn’t really kick in until about two hours from the end.  Also, the flashbacks seem disjointed in places, and the constant switching between characters can leave you a bit disoriented at times as to whom you are actually playing as, and the silent nature of the Rookie makes it hard to connect to the character at all.

While Halo 3: ODST started out as just a two hour expansion to it’s predecessor and a way to bridge the gap until Halo Reach is released next year, it is a game in it’s own right, and it is a good game which works well as a stand-alone entry into the Halo series.  The fact still remains that if you aren’t a fan of the Halo series, then this game will hardly cause you to convert, if you are a fan then you will have already bought it, and if enjoy the occasional shooter then you could do a whole lot worse.