First post, by ADDiCT
- Rank
- Oldbie
I finished the game on the "normal" diffculty setting this morning, and i must say i'm amazed. Not by the quality of the game, but amazed about the massive scores the game got all over the place (9.5 on Gamespot and IGN, for example). When reading the reviews, it sounds like Halo III is the best, most groundbreaking console FPS ever.
Well, to make it short: in my opinion, it isn't. And it doesn't deserve these high ratings. It makes me wonder how much of MS's marketing budget for the title has been spent to "buy" these ratings (or "influence" them, by buying ad space).
Don't get me wrong, i like console FPS. They are a different affair than PC shooters for sure, but once you get used to the controls, they can be a lot of fun. I played a lot of them, on the XBox, the XBox 360, and the GameCube (the consoles i own). I also liked Halo II on the XBox very much. The graphics, music, gameplay, story - it was a really intensive game, and i enjoyed playing it very much. I'm not much of an online player, though. I haven't got enough time to get really good with the games, and that leads to a situation where i can see the potential in online gaming, but am not able to enjoy it very much, because i'm getting my arse kicked big time by all the people that have been playing the game for ages, and know every trick. I'm judging the single player part of Halo III.
Halo III is a good game. The graphics and sound are nothing short of amazing. There are moments in the game where you can just say "Wow". At times, there's so much happening around you, that you're just overwhelmed by all the explosions, NPC speech lines, action, and so on. But the problem is: the single player campaign is only 5 or 6 hours long. I was playing on the "normal" difficulty setting, and it seemed that the game was over just at a point where i started to _really_ enjoy playing it. The storyline is forgettable, and there was not a single point in the game where i had the feeling that i had achieved something. It was just a matter of figuring out how to handle the enemies and weaponry, and from that point, all battles were more or less the same. There were two major "stoppers" in the game - one fight where i had to fight two gigantic enemies at once, and one where i had to deal with a lot of "Flood" enemies. But, with the correct strategy, and because of the game's liberal use of checkpoints, these sequences were not much of a problem to complete.
My conclusion is that Halo III is nothing more than a "extension" to Halo II, like a Halo 2.5. The storyline ends the way it should have ended in Halo II, instead of the lame cliffhanger they presented us in that game. The game's engine has been updated to make use of the XBox 360's hardware power, but there are no new game elements, besides some minor additions like removable turrets, or the "extra powers" (Bubble shield, etc.) you can use. The campaign is too short, and the storyline is lame. Halo III is a good game, but it's not the groundbreaking, genre-defining piece of software MS wants us to believe it is.
I wish MS had invested the marketing budget for the game's development instead. With more money, and a bit more time, the game could have really been groundbreaking (remind you, i'm talking single player). The potential is definitely there, and i feel like i was kind of betrayed. This could have been BIG, really big.
On a second thought, it seem absolutely logical that this game _had_ to be hyped the way it is. With the current situation on the console market (Nintendo selling the WII like crazy, and all the fuss about the 360 hardware), MS is desperately in need of good publicity. And they seem to be pretty good in terms of marketing, PR, lobbying, and all that stuff.
Any opinions on this? Am i the only one with that kind of view?
