Halo 3: ODST preview

Posted by Al Warmington on Fri 24 Jul 2009

T3 goes hands on with Halo's second outing sans Master Chief

It’s a peculiar irony that in a year when Xbox 360 titles seem unusually thin on the ground, there will be two new Halo titles on the shelves. The first, Halo Wars, came out in February, bringing the Halo universe into RTS territory for the first time. Although it proved to be a decent console RTS, the game sadly failed to live up the standards set by its shooter cousins. So the attention is now on Halo 3: ODST to maintain Xbox 360’s momentum against its two console rivals and to prove that the Halo universe is more than a one trick pony.

Halo 3: ODST, as the name implies, is a spin off from 2007’s Halo 3. This time you won’t be steering Master Chief’s seven foot tall, heavily armoured, gravity resistant, bright green backside around; you’ll be adopting the guise of a smaller, weedier and considerably more vulnerable Orbital Drop Shock Trooper.

These guys aren’t wimps, of course. They’re the ones who regularly get dumped behind enemy lines when there’re no MJOLNIR clad supersoldiers for a hundred miles, so naturally they’re testosterone charged war junkies who, if we were feeling cynical, we’d say we’d already met a thousand times before. But it also stars the voice acting of Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Castle) so we’ll let it slide this time.

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The single player game is chance for Halo developer, Bungie, to try its hand at new things, specifically in terms of narrative. Lars Bakken, Senior Designer at Bungie, told us that they’re definitely not bored of Master Chief, but that “ODST is a prime candidate to tell a different kind of story from a different perspective”.

Once you’ve watched a short intro sequence that sets up all the various ODST characters you’ll be dealing with throughout the game, your character, ‘The Rookie’, is unceremoniously fired towards New Mombasa – the same place where much of climax of Halo 3 takes place, albeit a couple of weeks earlier. Unsurprisingly, the shit hits the fan pretty soon thereafter, leaving Rookie unconscious for six hours, waking up to find himself alone in the occupied city with no sign of his squadmates.

So far, so familiar, right? However, Bungie is shaking things up a bit from its usual linear story design. New Mombasa is a sprawling metropolis, which you are given freedom to roam around from the first few minutes of the game. Group Product Manager, Ryan Crosby also informed us it is the “biggest single level ever made in a Halo game”. As you wander the streets, you’ll be piecing together clues as to what happened to the rest of your team, and these playable flashbacks act as a kind of level within the level.

Bungie’s demo only showed off the first section, called ‘Dutch’, in which you take over one of your squad mate’s characters briefly for a fight to defend and destroy a bridge being assaulted by Covenant forces.

“You can approach these levels in any order you like,” Bakken explained. Although he admitted that there was nothing so sophisticated as a branching story, it at least gives some semblance of control over how you do what and when. He also pointed out that “you can approach the world in any way you like,” referring to ODST’s new types of gameplay.

Because this isn’t Master Chief any more, Bungie has made a number of tweaks to the long standing Halo play style. There’s a danger this could be seen as meddling with something already perfected over three previous games, but it’s more a means to demonstrate the differences between the two protagonists. Fall damage is the obvious starting point – you’re no longer impervious to leaping off tall buildings, and a tumble will take your health down just like in any other game. The other tweaks are more subtle – you can’t jump as high, you can’t run as fast and you can’t dual wield like a Spartan, but underneath it all there’s still Halo’s razor sharp controls. And you’ll need to keep an eye out for health packs for a change.

The ODST forces get a couple of new tools as well. There’s a new silenced sub-machine gun and a scoped pistol that’s very much like the one in Halo: Combat Evolved. ODST are also armed with a visor that outlines enemies and improves your vision in low lighting. This in turn allows you to get the drop on Covenant patrols; although there’s no specific stealth mechanic in Halo 3: ODST, you will be able to make your attacks more subtle than before – charging in all guns blazing is an option, but not necessarily a wise one given your relatively weakened state.

So, the single player game looks set to please fans of the Halo series with its fresh perspective on the Covenant invasion of Earth, but the multiplayer side is going to be just as important and we were able to play a couple of rounds of Halo 3: ODST’s new Firefight mode at the event.

A number of comparisons have been drawn between it and Gears or War 2’s Horde mode, but as a gameplay mode it has been around for a while – your team of four players faces a never-ending succession of enemy forces that arrive in waves of steadily increasing strength. You get seven lives shared between the squad. The goal: survive as long as you can.

Health, ammo and distribution of weapons all need to be closely monitored if you’re to survive even a handful of waves, and good communication – or at least covering each other’s backs – is equally crucial. The thrill of taking down a Brute as it leaps towards your partner’s exposed flank is certainly not to be underestimated. There’s a competitive element too – the scoring is a mixture of Halo 3’s coop campaign scoring with the multiplayer medals; you get more points assigned for pulling of headshots and stringing kills together, but you’ll have to balance that with not wasting too many of collective pool of lives.

Halo 3: ODST also comes with a second disc, which contains all of the Halo 3 multiplayer maps and three new ones; Heretic, Longshore and Citadel. The second disc launches itself (no disc swapping necessary) and allows you to play alongside ordinary Halo 3 players – it’s essentially a package with the Halo 3 multiplayer portion on it.

For the really avid Halo fan, that may mean you’ll end up buying the same map packs twice over. There’s no getting around that, but apart from the extra three maps, there’s one other thing to sweeten the deal – Halo 3: ODST comes with a beta invite to the new Halo: Reach.

Bungie wasn’t sharing much about this next spin-off, announced back at E3, but the staff’s hushed, reverential tones suggested it could be something very special indeed. In the meantime though, Halo 3: ODST is looking like a solid means of scratching your Halo itch. Keep your eyes peeled – we’ll be bringing you a full review closer to the September 22^nd release date.

Link: Halo