If you’re like me (and you’d better be!), the idea of a first person shooter with a sci-fi story starring Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk, and Tricia Helfer is enough to pique your interest. Throw in Bungie as the developer and it’s shaping up to multiple levels of awesome. Really, the only thing that could ruin an experience like this would be a way too short story mode and a weak multiplayer. Oh wait, “Halo 3: ODST” has those too? Well, fuck.
Don’t get me wrong, “ODST” is a good game, and in some ways I like it more than “Halo 3”, but for $60 I expect a little more game in there. The development team, comprised of a fraction of Bungie’s main team, did some interesting things with the title, mostly in the way the story is told.
The ODST, that’s Orbital Drop Shock Troopers are a special ops type of group on a secret mission. Things go bad and the team gets separated, and you get your ass knocked out for six hours. Most of the game centers around The Rookie, a nameless filler character you play, as he searches the ruined city of New Mombasa for his missing team. As he finds clues, the game switches perspectives to fill in the missing time. So you keep switching characters, and jumping around in the six hour timeline, playing different roles and unraveling what went wrong. There is also a side story, told through audio recording found throughout the city, that explains a little more about what happened before you arrived on the scene. The voice acting is great (though the character models look a bit funky), and the story is compelling and interesting, even if you’re not a fan of the series. It’s a very character driven story, without as much of the alien governmental religious bullshit from the main games.
Much of the game feels like a toned down version of the main game, a “Halo Lite” if you will. All the normal villains from the previous games are here — Grunts, Brutes, Hunters et al — but the scale of the battles has been pulled back. Sure there are a few huge fights, but nothing to the scale of “Halo 3”. The fact really hits home when you fight a Scarab, the massive spider looking tank that was stomping and blowing up shit left and right in “Halo 3”. In “ODST” you shoot its butt a few times from the safety of the air, and it’s toast.
If you don’t die a bunch, the story mode is around five hours, which is about as long as it took me to beat “Disney/Pixar’s Up”. That’s just way too short for a first party title with this much hype behind it. Sure, you can go back and try to find more audio files, but that’s not really a compelling reason to replay the same levels. There is a co-op multiplayer mode called Firefight, where you defend against waves of enemies. It funny because this is the closest thing that comes to the scale of the original games, and it seems like they could have worked it into the campaign, since that supports co-op anyway.
If you don’t own “Halo 3” there is a significant bonus in that “ODST” comes with a second disc of “Halo 3” multiplayer. It allows you to play online in one of the most popular games on Xbox Live, with all the maps, including the DLC ones. But chances are anyone who bought this game was a Halo fan anyway, so it’s just a useless extra disc.
It’s hard to recommend a purchase for “ODST”. The game is solid, but nearly everything good about it is the same stuff Bungie has made for three other games now. The storyline is interesting, the voice acting is great, and the gameplay is good, though mostly just an easy version of Halo 3 with limited environments. But it’s also only a few hours long, and most of the multiplayer is literally the same as the last game. If you need a little Halo fix before “Halo: Reach” comes out, or you have hard on for Nathan Fillion (and who doesn’t?), go for it. But maybe just a rental.
