Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over our first spin-off title, Halo 3: ODST! This was a weird little release: the series’ overarching narrative seemed to have concluded, so there was a lot of questions about how Halo would be able to continue. Bungie then announced this game, which had started out as an expansion to Halo 3, but would evolve into its own stand-alone experience. The resulting game is pretty interesting for a number of reasons, not least of all because it’s the first game to not feature Master Chief in any capacity. Would the game hold up without the franchise’s hero? Read on to find out…

Love

• Experimentation – Halo 3: ODST shakes up the franchise’s normal campaign structure in some pretty fundamental ways, which make the game feel very unique among Halo titles. The campaign is split into two timelines. The A-plot is the present, where you play as “the Rookie”, who has become isolated from his squad and is trying to figure out what happened to them as he makes his way across New Mombasa. The B-plot involves a bunch of flashbacks to the Rookie’s various squadmates as they battle Covenant forces. The B-plot plays out through traditional Halo levels, but the Rookie’s sections occur through a semi-open world as you navigate through the isolated streets of New Mombasa. In these sections, you have to decide how to reach objectives while confronting or avoiding any Covenant patrols you may come across. It’s a fairly unique structure for a Halo game, let alone a stand-alone DLC expansion, and I have to appreciate that they at least tried to do something different here.
• The Opening Drop is Intense – You name a game ODST (which stands for “orbital drop shock trooper”), and you’d better believe I expect to get dropped from orbit at some point. In that regard, ODST does not disappoint. It opens with some quick character introductions, and then it’s feet-first into hell through a visually-spectacular and chaotic opening that is easily the highlight of the game.

Mixed

• VISR System – ODST introduces the VISR optical HUD, which has some fairly interesting functionality. It plays similarly to Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter, outlining objects in the world and highlighting friendlies and enemies. With the larger, more open environments, it can be very helpful to have a way to point out where to go next. However, I can’t help but feel like it is a bit of a crutch, like detective vision in so many games of this era: the environments do not clearly communicate where you need to go, so instead the game relies on waypoints and colour-coded highlights to do that for you. It also doesn’t help that the game often makes VISR basically unusable, since it becomes a visual hinderance in bright areas, forcing you to toggle it on and off regularly.

Hate

• The Writing and Characters – For all its military realism, Halo has some pretty cartoonish characters between Master Chief’s confident badassery and Sergeant Johnson’s cigar-chomping antics. However, they’re also contrasted against more serious characters, like Jacob and Miranda Keyes, Lord Hood, the Arbiter, or even Cortana to a certain degree. However, ODST is clearly inspired by Joss Whedon’s writing style on Firefly, even down to casting Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, and Alan Tudyk in the lead roles. As a result of this influence, the entire cast are a bunch of cartoonish jokers who can’t take anything seriously or professionally (which gets especially egregious when Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer are arguing about relationship drama over comms in the middle of a warzone).
  • On top of this, ODST is framed like there’s a big mystery that you’re building towards, but the story itself is really uncompelling. The flashback sequences don’t really move the story forward at all, they just kind of exist to pad the runtime. It’s not until the last level that the story actually has some interesting developments, but by that point it is way too late to salvage this narrative. Let’s put it this way: the first three Halo games were about telling a story. This game is just fleshing out the series’ lore.
• The Level Design – While I will give ODST credit for trying something different with its structure, I really hate the move away from a more curated, linear level design. The streets of New Mombasa are huge and weirdly empty. It’s not unusual to spend a long time wandering around without even running into a Covenant patrol. I can see how this might be immersive to some players, but for my part, I found this incredibly dull. I’ve complained before about open world design and how it makes the minute-to-minute gameplay boring, so you can imagine how annoying ODST‘s slow, monotonous traversal gets for me.
• Health Regeneration System – ODST goes back to Combat Evolved‘s health system, where you have a regenerating shield and a health bar to maintain. However, one key difference is that the game will freak out at you long before your shield has actually gone down. This puts you in a stressed state way more often than previous Halo games. However, when you come to realize that the game is being over-zealous with its shield warnings, you kind of just ignore them and push more aggressively, making this new warning system kind of worthless. It also doesn’t help that health stations are really badly sign-posted, so you can go for long stretches of gameplay without a chance to heal while playing as the Rookie.
• The AI – Unfortunately, ODST is the first Halo game where the AI feels straight-up dumb:
  • First of all, the friendly AI are incredibly stupid, especially when they’re in vehicles. Their pathfinding is awful, often getting stuck on objects or charging at a tank and then getting you blown up with no real opportunity to prevent this from happening. On more than one occasion, I had a story-important squad mate get stuck and then (very obviously) have to be teleported ahead of me to prevent them from getting left behind.
  • Perhaps worst of all though is the enemy AI. In ODST, you’re not playing as Master Chief, so you should feel out-gunned by Covenant forces. The game certainly throws overwhelming numbers of Covenant at you, but the game feels like it has gimped them compared to previous Halo games. Throughout this game, I felt like I was making reckless plays which would have gotten me killed in any previous Halo game, but I was getting through because enemies would just refuse to shoot me, or have terrible aim. Making matters worse, I was being forced to make these reckless plays, because I just wasn’t being given the resources needed to deal with all these enemies. I dunno who thought it made sense to have me fight two Wraith tanks and two squads of Covenant forces at the same time with just anti-infantry weapons, but the fact that I was able to pull through this with little difficulty is kind of ridiculous.

Halo 3: ODST left me thoroughly underwhelmed. I wasn’t really sure what to expect going in, but I really dislike all the ways that this game attempted to shake-up the Halo formula. I appreciate the attempt to differentiate this game, and I’m sure that there are people who love what they were going for here, but nothing they’ve tried here makes Halo more fun to play for me. As annoying as Combat Evolved could be, I still enjoyed myself there more than I did here.