If Halo 3 was following the likes of Bioshock (fantastic game) the epic single player campaign would have been enough to warrant the price tag, but Bungie went over the top with gaming features. Considering Halo 2’s multiplayer basically got Xbox Live off the ground and was the top played game online up until Gears of War was released is proof enough that the multiplayer aspect of Halo 3 had to be amazing. The developers kept a lot of the multiplayer parts the same and only messed with things that were broken. Anyone who took part in the beta earlier this year can attest to this and unless you liked Halo 2 death match you probably will not be overly ecstatic with Halo 3’s. Tournament lovers can battle in ranked or unranked matches with up to 16 players over Xbox Live in a variety of different modes and levels. Thrown into Halo 3 is something that the developers have said they wanted in Halo 2 but were unable to include: the video saver. What this does is give gamers all over the world the chance to become instant directors by saving and editing online matches and then uploading them to their personal Halo 3 account, which can be viewed by anyone signed in to the Bungie servers. Considering the amount of movies already online it is obvious this is a very popular feature of Halo 3 and the possibilities are endless, look out “Red vs. Blue”.
If this wasn’t enough Halo 3 also features a map editor mode that stands up there with anything out on the PC market today. Bungie has given gamers the ability to turn into a “God like” level designer in Halo 3 and it is freaking fun. Want to toss a tank right into the middle of that field, maybe a transport next to the flag which whips players right back to their base, the possibilities in this are also endless. Most gamers would be happy with this, but Bungie threw everyone off a few months ago and announced that the final game in the Halo trilogy would feature online co-op over Xbox Live. Nothing new, right? Wrong, this time around gamers can play through the entire single player campaign online with not only one friend but three. One gamer plays as Master Chief, the second as a Spartan warrior, the third as the Arbiter, and the fourth as a entirely new character to the Halo franchise. Halo 3 uses a fantastic matchmaking system that should literally be implemented into every online 360 game made from this point forward. I could probably write an entire review on just the multiplayer portions of Halo 3 but it is time to move on. Basically all you need to know is it includes one of the most intense, full-feature, badass multiplayer portions of any game I have ever played so even if re-playing the single player campaign is not your thing Halo 3 will not get old for a very long time.
When the Halo 3 multiplayer beta launched earlier this year there were screams all over the internet about the graphics and honestly I was just as worried as everyone else. Since then I have purposely tried to ignore new movies and screenshots of the single player game as I wanted the experience to be entirely new, with nothing spoiled. Whoa was I surprised when I booted up the single player campaign to see an entirely different looking game with high-resolution textures and environments to be drooled over. Don’t get me wrong, Halo 3 has a different look to it than Gears of War or Bioshock, two of the best looking games out on the Xbox 360, so some players may think it doesn’t look good. Different is not always a bad thing and honestly Halo 3 can stand up graphically to any next-gen videogame with ease. The guy at Best Buy told you that things looked much better in 1080p but never before was it truer than it is with Halo 3. Having played it on both a standard television and then on a 57” 1080p HDTV, the difference is insane. Small details that were not even noticeable in standard def are easily seen with the naked eye in high def. Even without a top notch television Halo 3 still looks really good and almost always runs at a steady frame-rate, some small hiccups here and there are quickly forgivable and usually happen around load times. Halo 3 levels are preloaded in at the beginning and then only take a tiny pause whilst you are playing.
It is obvious that the Halo series was always meant to be next-generation, this game was made for the Xbox 360 and it has never looked better than it does right now. All of the character models, including Master Chief, are much more detailed and the facial animations finally look realistic. There are old and new weapons in Halo 3 and all of them look great while performing, the developers straight up said that items such as the bubble shield could not have been done on last-gen systems. Because this game is so freaking epic the developers had to make the numerously different levels look great, and damn did they succeed. If you are not in the middle of a huge firefight it is sure well going on in the background, and during co-op play last night we found ourselves, multiple times, going off course just to check out some cool graphical features of Halo 3. Although it has been done before, small things such as the foliage moving with your player just make this game feel polished. The graphics of Halo 3 have been in the works for over three years now and it shows from every corner of the game. As I said before Halo 3 is not the best looking game on the Xbox 360 at it’s core, but if everything in the game is taken into account it outperforms so many of the titles out there and gamers really shouldn’t be disappointed
