Welcome back to the Halo love/hate series! In this entry we’ll be going over the series’ third entry, Halo 3! We’re now past the point where I had any first-hand experience with these games: I remember this game being an absolute blockbuster at the time, and it was the #1 shooter in the world for a few years until Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare took over the genre, but I never got to play it. Could it resolve Halo 2‘s cliffhanger in a satisfying way? Read on to find out…

Love

• New Weapons – As usual, a new Halo game means new weapons, and they’ve introduced some really cool ones here:
  • Best of all is the brute hammer. This thing is ridiculously satisfying to use. It’s devastating, one-shots pretty much everything, has a large area of effect blast when it hits (which will kill multiple clustered enemies), sends debris flying on impact, and makes a really loud noise. It’s the quintessential distillation of the brutes as a species, and it’s fantastic.
  • The spiker and mauler are both really cool options. The spiker is kind of like an SMG version of the needler, it’s really reliable and enjoyable to use. The mauler, meanwhile, is a shotgun pistol. Both of these guns are dual-wieldable, which just makes them even more fun to use.
  • The Spartan laser is also a really cool power weapon that puts out a devastating amount of damage. However, it remains fairly balanced due to its long charge time before it fires, meaning that you have to keep the target in your sights or waste the shot.
  • Oh, and the game now lets you pickup gun turrets from around the environment and use them as power weapons! It’s as badass as it sounds to pick up a heavy machine gun or a plasma cannon and then spend the next minute mowing down everything in sight.
• Weapon Rebalancing – Halo 2 suffered a bit due to its wildly unbalanced weapons. You could maybe argue that this was intentional, but Halo 3 is clearly trying to make every weapon viable. There aren’t really any weapons here that I wouldn’t want to pickup. Most of the weak guns from Halo 2 have been improved massively: the assault rifle is back and actually useable, the shotgun is worthwhile again (although it’s still nowhere near as good as it was in Combat Evolved), the plasma rifle is far better against non-shielded enemies, the Brute shot is significantly better… really, the only weapon that has clearly been nerfed to oblivion is the energy sword. The lunge distance has been made extremely short, and while it does one-shot most enemies, I’ve had instances where I’ve had to hit a Flood combat form five times to get a kill on normal difficulty… HOW???
• Epic, Free-Form Combat Scenarios – Gone are almost all the corridor shooting levels from previous Halo games: Halo 3 loves to revel in the large combat arenas where you fight alongside allies and use various vehicles to combat hordes of enemies. Probably the biggest highlight is driving a mongoose ATV while your allies blast rockets at enemy vehicles… and then a scarab walker shows up and you need to disable it, jump on board, and then blow it up from the inside. Combat is straight-up epic in this game!

Mixed

• Equipment Pickups – Halo 3 introduces several equipment pickups, which operate similarly to the temporary armour upgrades you could find in the previous two games (bubble shield, deployable cover, auto-turret, invisibility, invincibility, flashbang, etc). The big differences are that they are way more common and you get to choose when to use them. They’re… alright. They certainly work, but they do not feel all that important to the combat flow (at least on normal difficulty: I can see bubble shields and deployable cover being way more impactful on legendary). A lot of these equipment pickups are stationary once used, which isn’t really something you want to be doing in Halo most of the time. It’s also really hard to see them; I kept accidentally picking them up by walking over them… I could count the number of times I intentionally grabbed an equipment pickup on one hand and still have fingers to spare for your mom.

Hate

• The Story – Halo 3 is a suitably epic finale for a story about a galactic war and genocidal alien parasite. However, as it goes on, I can’t help but have several nagging issues about it which sour it somewhat:
  • First of all, the grand, sci-fi world-building of Combat Evolved and Halo 2 is pretty much gone. We learn nothing new about the Covenant society (which, if you’ll recall, had its entire freaking capital city genocided by the Flood in Halo 2). Basically nothing new is learned or introduced here, it’s just culminating the events of the last two games. Aside from a couple big deaths, there’s no risks taken. That’s fine, I guess, but it’s disappointing after the thoughtful writing and big revelations brought in by Halo 2.
  • On a related note, the war just kind of… ends. The prophets are dead, but you’re telling me that there’s no Covenant still choosing to fight? The Brutes sure as hell seemed to want to fight this war, they’re not taking over and continuing the fight? There’s no new power structure forming? Oh, and the game acts like the Flood have been defeated, but that was just one Gravemind… given that we know there are multiple Halo rings still out there, that presumably means that there are several installations which still have Flood on them, right?
  • I get that Cortana’s out of the picture for most of the game due to the events of Halo 2, but you can really feel her absence (and, when she comes back, it’s a breath of fresh air). Definitely makes you appreciate her character more, but the entire narrative suffers without her.
  • I also found it pretty disappointing that the last couple levels are basically just rehashing the ending of Combat Evolved, to lesser effect, in my opinion.
  • Finally, Arbiter’s just kind of “here”. People complained about him in Halo 2, so Bungie folded and he’s no longer playable outside of co-op. He’s still gets a couple story moments, but his character development is stunted and we miss out on a lot of the developments that would be happening on the Covenant side of things (like that the Elites are now working with humanity against the Covenant).
• Flashbangs – So, something I neglected to mention about equipment: enemies get to use them as well. This is not that big a deal most of the time, but where it becomes infuriating is that one of the pickups is a flashbang. It’s worthless when you use it, but when Brutes start chucking them around, they’re infuriating. There’s a reason most first person shooters do give NPCs flashbangs, it basically makes the game unplayable when they’re used. Thankfully, these were only used on a handful of occasions during my playthrough, but there was one section early in the game where Brutes were just spamming them at me and it drove me nuts. Oh, and speaking of which…
• Brutes – Brutes just are not that fun to fight compared to Elites. At least in Halo 2, you only start fighting Brutes halfway through, but here they’re the main enemy for a good chunk of the game. Since they don’t have shields, this breaks the strategic weapon choices from the previous two games, since plasma is less-necessary. They’re also a lot less intelligent, so the enemy AI is not nearly as interesting as it was previously.

Halo 3 is solid, but I can’t help but feel disappointed with it compared to Halo 2. While it is a fitting conclusion for the trilogy, the world just feels smaller and more dumbed down after the expansion it received in Halo 2. The gunplay is definitely improved, so it has that, but I guess this just shows where my priorities are with games: gameplay is just one factor to the overall package, and story matters quite a lot to me, to the point where Halo 2 is the clear best of the trilogy, even though Halo 3 undeniably plays better overall.