Unlike the first two Halo titles, I’ve never played Halo 3 before now. And I’ve had high hopes. The series seem to be so beloved for the game universe and the characters, and Halo 2 did build up a truly engaging story that seemingly could only get more exciting. But it seems that something changed between Halo 2 and 3 and this game turned out to be just fine.
As with the rest of the games in the series, I’ve only played the main campaign for the story-driven content and played the game solo. Based on that, I gotta say that Halo 3 might be both the most refined of the series of the original 3, but also the least ambitious. It is well known by now just how much content was planned for the second game and pretty much everything that happens in 3 was meant to happen in 2. Yet, somehow I expected Halo 3 to be more than just a very extended ending sequence to the previous game. But it kinda is.
Where the second title built a genuinely engaging narrative with two different viewpoints and two playable characters, both of whom had some time to be fleshed out for more than just a cool dude with a gun, third game dials everything back to the more primitive level of the original game. You never switch to other characters (in singleplayer), you don’t get any real character moments or development other than the most basic heroic tropes, the whole storyline is a straight line with no twists and turns. The game starts fully expecting you to play it immediately after the second game (there’s absolutely nothing explaining what’s going on otherwise), so you know whose butt you have to kick. Then it reminds you that there are also those other annoying bad guys and then you fight everyone and the game ends. With a copy of the escape sequence from the original game, except slightly less annoying now. And after how full of personality and exciting narrative moments the second game was, this feels like a cheap direct to video sequel.
Not that they cheaped out on the gameplay, though. It does play like an improved version of what we had in 2. There’s more variety in weapons, in enemies, in vehicles to drive. The visuals are pretty nice for 2007 and aren’t too terrible for modern times, with some scenes still looking nice. The soundtrack is as good as ever. The levels are, in general, all better. Though, they all also feel less exciting and inventive with situations and some require you to run through some locations a few times in the worst kind of backtracking, though nothing as horrible as the first game’s levels. Oh and of course there are a couple of confusing same-looking levels with the terrible enemies and checkpoints that suddenly refuse to work well. Luckily, in case of this game, this only ever becomes a problem by the very end of the game.
So, yeah. It’s… okay. It doesn’t have anything exciting, it doesn’t feel or play that much unlike the late 00s action games, it’s a rather plain and boring conclusion to the story that started in the previous game. It’s most certainly not bad and you might enjoy playing it. But unless you’re really interested in Halo to the point of liking the mediocre entries as well, I can’t really recommend checking it out.