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Review: Halo 3

Published on May 30, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , .

Halo 3The past week and change I’ve been glued to my TV with the new 360, enjoying myself both on and offline. I have been able to beat Halo 3 on Legendary with Kevin and a few of his friends over Live. After doing that, I went through the levels again to collect all the Gold and Silver skulls. I think I need a slight break from the game before I go back and get the rest of the achievements, but I’ve been playing quite a bit on Xbox Live to get a feel for the online multiplayer (and to get back into some online FPS gameplay). After a little bit of thought, I’m going to try to standardize these reviews as I go.

Overview

Halo 3 is the third in its incredibly popular series by Bungie which arguably laid the foundation for bringing the FPS to the console. You assume the role as Master Chief, as what would seem the last surviving “Spartan”. You play through a short story in which you need to fight the “Covenant” as you progress through the game, attempting to silence the Minister of Truth (a crazed prophet looking to end humanity as we know it). As the game progresses, you find a new enemy, the “Flood”, a zombie-like species in which a single spore could destroy an entire species through its infection.

From Wikipedia:

Halo 3′s story centers on the interstellar war between 26th century humanity, led by the United Nations Space Command, and a collection of alien races known as the Covenant. The player assumes the role of the Master Chief, a cybernetically enhanced supersoldier, as he wages war in defense of humanity, assisted by human Marines as well as allied alien Elites led by the Arbiter

Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)

I cannot find much reason to go against the grain of the millions of players of this game, and badmouth it too much. Halo 3 is an incredibly fun game to play, as it is one of the few games available on the 360 that allow for you engage yourself with friends in any content the game provides, such as the campaign, multiplayer, and even the “Forge” where maps can be created and played. Halo itself has a comfortable control scheme, a great vehicle system, great multiplayer, and sits atop Microsoft’s flagship online service. With some decent content updates (a free map pack and one you can buy) the game itself stood out for months as the top played game, only to take a comfortable second seat to Call of Duty 4 since the first few weeks of January 2007.

The “Halo Experience”, being able to include friends both in your living room and miles away is one of my favorite parts of the game. If you don’t feel like taking on some online foes, you can just beat through the campaign on the level of your choice with your friends, which provides a really nice change in pace at times. I’m looking forward to playing more games that take this initiative of bringing in friends in a cooperative experience over outright competition. (I just bought Gears of War and am looking forward to Castle Crashers and giddily anticipating LittleBigPlanet) This sort of co-op experience just adds a nice sheen to the game, and keeps things like campaign even fresh. Normally I will play through a game once and never play it again, if only to show a friend a really cool area of the game. For the many problems I’ve had with Halo 3′s campaign, I’ve played through the last level over five times, and the entire campaign almost twice at this point, and it wouldn’t bother me to pick it up again if a friend asked.

Campaign

Halo 3′s campaign was a large disappointment for me. Before I continue, I should point out that this was the first game I’ve played in the entire series, and time and time again I felt that Bungie was punishing me for committing such a vile act. Up until recently, I did not own an Xbox, and when my college roommates were playing, we would always be in multiplayer beating the crap out of each other. I didn’t know any of the backstory, the setting, the time (other than the not-so-distant future), the characters, or any of the drive behind the characters.

From the people who I have talked to, they have told me that the campaign was pleasing, if not a good addition to the series. As a newcomer, the story seems to be lacking in both depth and complexity, and doesn’t allow you time to really understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, other than humanity is at stake, and you need to kill a ton of baddies along the way.

I took the time to watch the cutscenes throughout the entire game, sometimes even going back to watch them a few times to see if I missed some dialogue. Sure, I could have gone and looked up the entire story and character profiles online on the Halopedia, but games in it of themselves should be self-contained, and for a far-fetching game like the Halo series, Bungie should have taken the time to bring up to speed players on the story that has gotten the protagonist up to this point, to ease in newcomers, and refresh the minds of veterans to the series. Off the top of my head, there are a few questions that I still have about the whole story, such as: Why did Master Chief go to kill Arbiter in the first cutscene, Why is Arbiter allied with him, when they’re fighting against the Covenant (supposedly the race that the Elites belong to?), Where the hell do the two of them come from to find themselves in the woods in the first level? Why did Master Chief “jump” or do to get there? Who is the Minister of Truth and where did he come from, wasn’t he part of the Covenant too? Where the hell do these Halo rings come from, and who built them? I understand they’re weapons, but there’s no description on why they were created, who “owns” them, etc.

There’s more questions I have, but the majority of these problems really stem from having no explanations and no story attached to the game. It took me awhile to realize that Cortana’s overlay was actually a “good” character who was in trouble, and the attempt at using these overlays between Cortana and the Flood to give more a story background without having to throw in a cutscene was somewhat gimmicky and didn’t help the game that much, and originally just confused me.

While I found it entertaining, the endless barrage of simply beating down enemies, be they Flood or Covenant got a tad bit repetitive at times. It seemed that the only difference in the gameplay when you weren’t mowing down the same enemies with a different arsenal, you were clicking a button, or meleeing a weak point in a ship to bring down the entire thing seemed somewhat lacking for me. To it’s own credit though, I just finished playing SOTC, and any sort of boss battle is going to be disappointing for the next few months anyway.

Despite this, I find being able to play through the campaign with your friends can add a depth to playing the game that I haven’t been able to find in many recent games. The same level can be different, every time you play it with the way you and your friends approach playing it. I’m sure there will eventually be some sort of monotony to it at a given point, but I’ve yet to reach that state of boredom when approaching the campaign, and have enjoyed it every time, even with the slight pitfalls.

Online/Multiplayer Experience

The multiplayer experience in Halo 3 has always been a blast for me, as my roommates were the ones that introduced me to this game back in sophomore year when Halo 2 was very popular. Still in my PC FPS “dark age”, it took me some time to warm up to the whole idea of playing with a controller, but the whole experience of multiplayer in the living room really grew to me. Even now, being able to play Team Deathmatch with friends both in live and at my house is one of my favorite features, and currently is my game of choice to play on Xbox Live because of the availability to team up with friends and play. Especially in the same room – this is probably the biggest downfall of Call of Duty 4 that I will bitch and moan about.

Weaknesses (What I’d Change)

Backstory and Depth/Complexity. The game itself didn’t lend to newbies to the series, and tended to leave me in the dust as to understand what was going on. Since the just finishing 1984 again, one quote that Winston writes in his dairy comes to mind: “I understand the HOW, but I do not understand the WHY”. This could have been fixed by a voiceover, a Star Wars-ish textual introduction, or even a quick cutscene.

Repetition. I mowed down baddies for six to eight hours. Granted, thats what I would expect from the series, but I don’t think it would be past the developers to add a bit more of an addition to the game, to make it a bit more engaging to the users. Taking down the shield by simply pressing a button after clearing a room of enemies does not seem very rewarding. Why not a puzzle that I need to solve, maybe one that changes with the amount of players in the game – and requires more interaction and teamwork in order to accomplish as the game goes on? I’m not saying to turn the thing into an Action RPG/FPS, or create mind-numbing fetchquests to increase gameplay hours, but a little more innovation and ingenuity in progressing throughout the story could make the experience that much more rewarding to the user.

Lack of Physics Use. While it’s not a prescribed way to beat the Scarabs, I had a fun time either landing a Hornet right on top and destroying the behemoth, but even more I enjoyed driving a Warthog or Mongoose off of a ramp or a cliff to board it as well. Only on the final level do we see some intense driving with jumps for no other reason to create suspense and allow for some really cool in-game explosions and whatnot, but I think that there could have been a definite increase on how the game’s physics were used to add to the entire gameplay, and even the competition aspect of it. Hopefully they pick up where they left off and add some more for Halo 4.

More Innovative Weapons. Other than the incredibly awesome Energy Sword, Gravity Hammer, and maybe the Needler, the rest of the arsenal of the weapons in Halo 3 are pretty much iterations of Machine and SMGs. The “cooldown” idea for the covenant guns are interesting, but are pretty much the same with varying ranges of effect. What happened to some of Unreal’s awesome gun ideas they had? I loved the idea of the Shock Rifle, the Bio Gun, the Teleporter, among some. Adding too many of these guns would outright change the style of the gameplay Halo has, but I think a little artistic freedom can be taken since the game is put a few hundred years into the future.

Grenades (Online). The incendiary grenades don’t find themselves into the game much at all, let alone their lack of availability online, and now we’ve got two types of sticky grenades. You can only have so many grenades, but this could be improved and added a bit more in online play to switch things up. (The equipment was a good move in this direction, I really enjoy the changes those add to gameplay both online and in campaign)

Maps and Voting (Online). While someone made a good point that by reducing the control they player has on the gametype and maps, Bungie can ensure that there is somewhat of an even distribution of maps and gametypes being played for all players, but I think more control should be given to the players when looking for games. I think the playlists that separate could be divided up even further, allowing a more specific look into what is being offered, and I think voting should allow players to vote on both a level and a gametype. Or gametypes should be their own playlist. I know I would happily play a few hours straight on a shotty-snipers/team snipers binge from time to time, and I’m sure others would as well. Give more control to your players for what they want to play, and just let people know how active those are when looking through the playlists. While Bungie has the statistics on the gameplay already, it makes it more overt to see what gamers are preferring in your game.

Experience/Rankings (Online). I haven’t looked this up online, but that’s my point – I shouldn’t have to. I’ll be playing with some friends or random people I’ve partied up with, and over the course of winning a few games, a teammate will gain 1 – 3 levels, where I may stay at the same level, or only be promoted once. While the game gives you some idea when you’ll get your next promotion as in “title”, it doesn’t give you any sort of insight as to what it takes you to move to the next numerical ranking you’re assigned in “Ranked” play.

In closing, if you own an Xbox 360 and enjoy the FPS genre, Halo is a must-own for your console. Next week I’ll hopefully have gotten through COD4, although playing through Veteran the first time through is proving to be a bit difficult. :)

Review: Shadow of the Colossus

Published on May 23, 2008 in Games. 0 Comments Tags: , , , , .

The second colossi

By the end of this past semester, I had been able to beat about six of the sixteen colossi in this game, before the push to finish all of my projects got in my way of finishing the game. Last week I was able to set up my PS2, pop in the game, and beat the rest of it over the course of a few days. Needless to say, I needed to sit back for a few days to wrap my head around the story, and the numerous strengths this game had. Plainly stated: this was one of the best games I have ever had the opportunity to play.

For those of you who have never heard of Shadow of the Colossus, here is the description provided in the game’s Wikipedia entry:

The game focuses on a young man named Wander who must travel across a vast expanse on horseback and defeat sixteen giants, beings collectively known as colossi, to restore the life of a girl. The game is unusual within the action-adventure genre in that there are no towns or dungeons to explore, no characters with which to interact, and no enemies to defeat, other than the colossi.

The game succeeds immediately through its incredible simplistic (yet detailed) movement and weapon system. You have two main weapons (a sword, and a bow with an infinite amount of arrows), and two main methods of transportation (your feet and your horse Argo). All of these methods of attack and travel are given to you at the start of the game, and there are no tasks required to acquire them. By the time you reach the first colossus, you have learned all of the major movements needed to beat the entire game.

The battles against the colossi are incredible, both in that they are challenging, and incredibly rewarding. Each battle is a puzzle as you must find a way to first get atop of the colossus, and then you must find its vital points to attack to defeat the monster. Retrospectively, games of the past where “boss battles” were the culmination of a level’s worth of beating through the motions of a platformer, SOTC is a collection of sixteen of these epic boss battles one after the other, bringing you closer and closer to reviving your loved one. Without going into too much detail, the last boss battle was perfect in so many ways. The various levels of complexity that needed to be seen through to beat the boss, along with the difficulty made it exactly what I’ve been looking for in a game for so long. Too often nowadays games have been “dumbed down” to make the play-through easier on casual gamers looking to play titles that would be enjoyed predominately by the “hardcore” titles. By example, by no means is Super Mario Galaxy considered a “hardcore” title, but I was incredibly disappointed when I beat Bowser on my first run-through without even breaking a sweat. So needless to say, the three and a half hours it took me to learn the motions to figure out what needed to be done to beat the boss I was contented by the entire experience. Although incredibly frustrating, I respected the fact that the final boss was not handed to me on a silver platter.

(SPOILER NOTE: Stop here if you want to save yourself from spoilers about the end of the game.)

In hindsight, the main strength of the game that makes me find it so compelling against the small (but growing!) library of games that I’ve beaten is the emotion that the game successfully evokes throughout the game, especially at its conclusion. With Wander having absolutely no interactions with NPCs or players other than your horse, and being surrounded by a vast, seemingly unending landscape to explore and discover the locations of your enemies, you are reminded how truly alone you are throughout the quest. From time to time during the colossi battles, the one hint you get from Dormin (the omnipresent voice in the game) just isn’t enough to tip you off on what to do to defeat the colossus, putting into perspective what your character is doing for love.

Finally, after defeating the sixteen colossi, after 8-12 hours of gaming you realize that you are finally able to have your love revived, and you will live happily ever after. In the final cutscene, your progress is interrupted by what would be interpreted as the shaman from the town/city/area which you are from, castrating you for stealing the sacred sword you have wielded all this time, and entering a forbidden land. Dormin, the creature that had been guiding you through defeating the sixteen colossi was ultimately an incredible evil that had been broken up into sixteen pieces to protect the world from its reign. With the sixteen colossi having been defeated, you now have unleashed true evil, opening up a proverbial pandora’s box on the world, tricked under the guise of an undying love for a woman. Dormin then assumes itself manifested through your body, and you control him as the shaman escapes with the sacred sword in an attempt to seal you off back into temple, again banishing Dormin to protect the fate of humanity. You briefly control Dormin, attempting to kill the shaman and his henchmen, and then trying to retreat from the gravitational pull towards the enchanted pool of water that will lock your soul away. All attempts at recovering from this fate are futile, which make the ending of the story so incredibly powerful to the gamer. You are given control of the player which has but one doomed fate, with no ability to change the outcome, but the opportunity to believe that there is a chance. This event makes you think not only to the last few minutes of the game, but the entire story, and every story driven game you have completed in the past. Ultimately, we are dragged along a predefined path until we reach the conclusion that was decided before we even loaded up the game for the system in the first time. It’s an ultra-realistic view at story-driven gaming as a whole, and your entire journey that you just suffered through ultimately for an outcome you will never be able to enjoy or experience. The game itself hits on every major point that I look on in a game, removing all the bullshit developers put in to increase gameplay and add to the feature set of their ultimate product. Shadow of the Colossus is a pinnacle of game design, development, story, and intertwining all three aspects into an awesome, amazingly entertaining experience

The game itself is a prequel to Ico, a game by the same Sony development team. While I recently purchased the game, I have yet to dive into it, but I can’t wait to see how the gameplay and story of Shadow of the Colossus leads into Ico.

What I would change/improve:

One thing Cory Barlog (creative lead of God of War 2) suggested at a symposium we both talked at was that every game you play has flaws and features that could be changed for the betterment of the game. He said that coming up with a list of ten things you didn’t like about the game can show your creativity and mindset in game design. Shadow of the Colossus was one of the greatest games that I have played, but it wasn’t without its flaws. I will not always come up with ten items, but at least explain a few of my rants about the gameplay and story as I see fit through my future game reviews.

Air collision, movement. For all the simple movement with complex implementations that the game had for movement, I was thoroughly disappointed with the little control you had with Wander after he had jumped. Jumping onto Ando was not always as easy as it should be, and you would have to mount him from a direct position on either side of him. This was very easy in Zelda: Twilight Princess, and coming back to this game was somewhat of a disappointment for how specific you had to be in order to mount Ando.

Ando’s movement. Ando is animated incredibly well, keeping the mannerisms of what riding a horse is like from its acutal animation to the controls that integrate with riding the horse. There are even incredibly minute details that I notice that impressed me. When you turn into a direction on Ando, the reign becomes taut on the side you are turning, just as you would when riding a horse. Having ridden one myself, the game accurately displays the wide turning radius that a horse has when running, but I found this – coupled with the collision with trees and cliff edges that steering Ando through thinner sections of land was tedious and annoying at times.

Lack of animation/movement changes. Maybe I was spoiled rotten by the beautiful playable cutscenes of God of War 2, where you would be able to preform incredibly epic movements by simply pressing a button on time, but the animation potential of Wander when fighting the colossi left something to be desired. I can think of one colossus fight, I think the 13th or 14th that you come up to, where you need to deflate the bubbles on its stomach, then use Ando to get near its lowered wings and jump on to get atop the colossus. With the exception of the final boss, this was my favorite fight as the movement required of you was intricate, and looked incredibly cool when you pulled it off correctly. I think there could have been more of these scenes that kept the frailty of Wander that was trying to be displayed, while giving the player some eye candy to do some great looking tricks when fighting a colossus. For instance, using your bow as a zipline piece when fighting the wall-climbing colossus would have been sweet!

Camera. Throughout the game the camera is the clutch of the game, as it creates a beautiful long shot for the traveling sequences with Ando, and the fighting sequences with the colossi. All this hard work however quickly falls apart when you find yourself in close quarters (both on Ando and off), and makes movement incredibly frustrating and your position in the game incredibly disorienting at times. Some experiences come to mind when riding Ando in a forest near the walls, or fighting the colossus that you needed to bang the tooth-looking crown on his head to move him. The swimming to get onto his back was very frustrating and took me much more time to figure out which way I was going versus what the camera was showing me.

Improper difficulty distribution. The difficulty of the game increases as you continue on with the colossi, having to figure out more interesting puzzles, dodge colossi fire, and continual movement changes. My major complaint is that 50% into the game, I fought some colossi that I figured out how to beat in the first camera fly-over before I had even started. Since there (for the most part) no real order to the colossi fights, I would argue that the ordering of the battles should have been rearranged to create a increasing challenge to the player.

Story holes. The game itself does a great job at telling its story, but I would have liked to see more about the girl, why she was dead, and what Wander had to do to get her out there, out of the village. I liked being surprised at the end by finding that he had stolen the sword, but seeing the whole “escape” from his village may have put a larger stress on the importance he placed in the task at hand.

Direction/Map resolution. Overall, finding some specific colossi was not as easy as I had hoped it would be. I understand that the difficulty of finding all of the colossi adds to the gameplay, but I became frustrated finding maybe two of the bosses and needed to seek some information as to find the missing pieces for where I should be following my sword’s beam of light. A few more in-game hints (via posted billboards) that I could have read or hints from Dormin after it was recognized that I was riding around for more than 15 minutes and had not found the colossus yet would have made the gameplay slightly smoother and left the frustration for the battles, not reaching them.

Again, I would stress to anyone that has not played this game to get their hands on a PS2 and a copy of the game to see what the hubbub is all about. It is a must-play if not a must-own for any one serious enough to look into the industry’s crowning achievements.