Review: Halo: ODST

[Mrsoupcup]

I just bought it. Since I never bought any of the maps this thing has an increadible value.

 

[I Resurection I]

I'm looking forward to the firefight mode, halo deserves a good survival mode.

 

[Geoffrey42]

Having just finished a playthrough (5h14m on Normal), I've got to say I'm pretty pleased with the campaign. I can also understand why people might say that co-op would ruin the experience; I won't go so far as to say that it would "ruin" it, but you're definitely not getting out of it what the developers intended.

Now, if only it were feasible to have a friend drop-in during the flashbacks (then out afterward), because having to decide between the AI driving and the AI shooting in a Warthog is always a lose-lose situation.

Spoiler: Mild Spoiler

Thank goodness for a Halo without Flood. I may be alone in that, but I hate fighting the Flood. I guess that's one thing I can look forward to with Reach...

Time to go back to my crawl through the city on Easy to get the audio files (only picked up 7 just playing through)...

 

[Steve Dark]

I'm sorry, what? Firefly reunion?? Hell, it could be a barbie game and you'd still have me! That is, once I learn how to get money to buy nice things with.

Plus, if you think that the map packs are about 1600* MS points total at the moment, so about £16*, then that takes the actual game price from about £30* down to £14*. Of course that doesn't mean I don't think the map packs are over-priced.

*Note that all figures presented are guesses from a bad memory.

 

[Vlane]

Curious, I've read the campaign is roughly 4 hours on Normal, and watching the video it looked as if that was the mode you were playing (that or they really made it easier to kill things in Heroic).

The overall impression I've heard is that this game just isn't worth $60, so I'm going to hold off for a bit even though I honestly do want to give it a whirl.

It's 4 Hours in Normal if you rush, don't find and listen to Sadie's Story, and skip cutscenes.

Doesn't sound that bad, after all you can beat MGS 4 in under 5 hours if you rush through it.

 

[MR T3D]

Curious, I've read the campaign is roughly 4 hours on Normal, and watching the video it looked as if that was the mode you were playing (that or they really made it easier to kill things in Heroic).

The overall impression I've heard is that this game just isn't worth $60, so I'm going to hold off for a bit even though I honestly do want to give it a whirl.

It's 4 Hours in Normal if you rush, don't find and listen to Sadie's Story, and skip cutscenes.

Doesn't sound that bad, after all you can beat MGS 4 in under 5 hours if you rush through it.

are you counting all the acts installing? or the actual gameplay.
i'm more inclinded to believe the latter, that thing took ages to install, and i talking about the ps3 that came with it.

 

[Vlane]

Curious, I've read the campaign is roughly 4 hours on Normal, and watching the video it looked as if that was the mode you were playing (that or they really made it easier to kill things in Heroic).

The overall impression I've heard is that this game just isn't worth $60, so I'm going to hold off for a bit even though I honestly do want to give it a whirl.

It's 4 Hours in Normal if you rush, don't find and listen to Sadie's Story, and skip cutscenes.

Doesn't sound that bad, after all you can beat MGS 4 in under 5 hours if you rush through it.

are you counting all the acts installing? or the actual gameplay.
i'm more inclinded to believe the latter, that thing took ages to install, and i talking about the ps3 that came with it.

I don't know how long it takes to install the acts since I haven't rushed through it in a while but let's just count the gameplaytime (if that's a word.... Wait Opera says it's not).

 

[MR T3D]

Curious, I've read the campaign is roughly 4 hours on Normal, and watching the video it looked as if that was the mode you were playing (that or they really made it easier to kill things in Heroic).

The overall impression I've heard is that this game just isn't worth $60, so I'm going to hold off for a bit even though I honestly do want to give it a whirl.

It's 4 Hours in Normal if you rush, don't find and listen to Sadie's Story, and skip cutscenes.

Doesn't sound that bad, after all you can beat MGS 4 in under 5 hours if you rush through it.

are you counting all the acts installing? or the actual gameplay.
i'm more inclinded to believe the latter, that thing took ages to install, and i talking about the ps3 that came with it.

I don't know how long it takes to install the acts since I haven't rushed through it in a while but let's just count the gameplaytime (if that's a word.... Wait Opera says it's not).

yeah, maybe playtime is a word.
but y'know, on easy you likely can run/shoot through it in under 5, skipping cinemas, and not counting installs (which are the main reason why i rarely evn tough it.)

 

[Nerdfury]

Shhhh.....you had me at "it has Nathan Fillion."

Oh, and how! I would go gay for that man! I hear he managed to work a 'Bam, said the lady!' into the script somehow.

 

[Epictank of Wintown]

Shhhh.....you had me at "it has Nathan Fillion."

Oh, and how! I would go gay for that man! I hear he managed to work a 'Bam, said the lady!' into the script somehow.

He did. It happens sometimes when Buck headhshots a Grunt.

Anyway! I said I'd be back to this thread once I had the game in my hands and had played it for myself.

Let me tell you guys right here and now...I literally said "Wow, that was awesome" when I finished this campaign. I rate it right up there with Halo: Combat Evolved's campaign- the best of the series, if you ask me. Now, I've been the first person I know to ***** and grumble about the previous two installments of the series, about what they did wrong and how I hated that they changed this and that seemed cheesy and so forth. You'll hear none of that out of me from ODST.

Sure, the Campaign isn't the longest- a friend of mine breezed through it in about four and a half hours on the Heroic difficulty. Of course, we didn't scour New Mombassa's rainy, dark, gloomy streets for all the little goodies hidden about (the audiophiles are amazing, by the way) but that's not the point. Even if you're playing with a friend, it feels like you're just one guy trying to make it through the night/day without getting your head taken off by a bunch of really intimidating aliens. No longer will you ever scoff at a Hunter while you charge headlong at them- it got to the point where we were burning so much ammo and so many grenades to kill a single pair of the bastards that we started sneaking around them.

The thing that makes the story, though, that makes the whole game are the personalities within it- even The Rookie. I was incredibly impressed with how much you could tell about what he was thinking by the little things he did. Tilting his head while looking at a drone camera, patting a Gauss cannon that he figured Dutch had manned, leaping into an open elevator shaft to try and rescue a very important person from certain doom- it's all very subtle, but it's there. It's also the first Halo campaign since CE that ended and left me feeling like I'd accomplished; there's no bullshit "TO BE CONTINUED? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL" bullshit here.

If you like Halo, you'll like this game. If you don't like Halo, you might just like this game anyway. I'd encourage everyone here to at least give it a rent if you don't purchase it.

 

[Ohlookit'sMatty]

I stopped playin these game a long Long time ago but the thought of been able to listen to Mall and the rest from Firefly is pretty sweet // I shall have to head over to youtube and watch all of the cut scenes cos its not worth buyin the game =D

Good review thou Russ

-M

 

[WafflesToo]

So all Bungie did was take thier existing engine (Halo 3), ALL of thier weapon and enemy models from said game (along with the SFX and voicework). Make one new character model (copy/paste/scale w/ pallette swap and different heads for your team) along with voice acting. Make enough maps for a 3-hour single player campaign. Then shipped it at full price... I can fully understand the vitriol around its release.

Oh, and personally, if I see that trailer one more time I'm gonna puke.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Make enough maps for a 3-hour single player campaign.

Stop playing on "Easy", then. On "Normal" difficulty, with 3 player co-op, and doing only the basic missions it's a 3-hour campaign... solo, on "Heroic", and actually playing the game instead of blitzing it, I found it to be an 8-hour campaign. (It took me 10, actually, but I'm lopping two hours off because I got stupid-lost early on out of my own inability to take the hints the game provided.)

I'll add that there's a lot of replay value too; there's the "Sadie's Story" parallel plot to solve, and the multiple difficulty levels as well as the "skull" gameplay modifiers. Plus Firefight if that interests players.

The "3-hour" figure is bogus, and the mark of a hatchet-job instead of an honest evaluation.

-- Steve

 

[WafflesToo]

And yet you neither refute nor even dispute any other claims. It seems that Bungie put the absolute minimum amount of effort into the product and expects nobody to balk at the $60 price tag.

...then overhyped the crud out of the thing. Wish they'd spent thier advertising budget on game content instead.

I do notice nobody really thinks it's a BAD game... just over priced and overhyped for the content we're being sold.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

And yet you neither refute nor even dispute any other claims.

Merely because I was lazy and went for the low-hanging fruit in your post rather than a systematic demolishment of the whole thing. Don't mistake silence for agreement.

-- Steve

 

[Podunk]

I would be more receptive of this game, but that Ad that keeps popping up for it just looks incredibly dumb to me...

If a pal had it I might convince him to let me give it a go, but with things like Brutal Legend and Dead Space: Etraction and so much more coming out now, I'm not really perpared to give the game a 60$ chance.

 

[Bones_153]

Bungie is just milking the momentum and fanbase while it still can.

Halo Franchise: 4 games released within 8 years. 1 game in development.
MGS Franchise: 11 games released within 11 years, plus "expanded editions". 3 games in development.

How anyone can say Bungie/Microsoft is milking the franchise is beyond me.

 

[lordswift1]

Didnt realise it had Adam Baldwin and Alan tudyk. going to have to listen more carefully. my firefly fanboy nerd is happy