Halo: ODST was originally conceived as an expansion pack to Halo 3. Instead it’s now a standalone game, which is handy for the Xbox 360 – because its “exclusives” cupboards would be looking fairly bare without it this Christmas. Read our full Halo: ODST review to see if it can really live up to heady expectations.
The idea of Halo: ODST is to splice stealth into what has, until now, been an all-action first-person shooter series. Instead of playing series überhero Master Chief, you’re the rookie in an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper squad, dropping in pods down to New Mombasa city.
When your crew get hit and you get blown off course, you’re left outnumbered and outgunned in the city trying to work out what happened. Halo: ODST plays out with your rookie scavenging the enemy Covenant-held city for clues: find a clue, get a flashback to what’s happened to the rest of your team.
Each flashback in Halo: ODST is a fully-playable section of the game where you take control of one of the other specialists in your squad: heavy weapons, pilot, sniper etc. And each flashback section leans towards that soldier’s flavour of action.
It’s a neat device – and the flashbacks work by-and-large wonderfully. It’s Halo-by-the-numbers gaming, sure. But when does playing through gigantic set-piece action moments or piling through chunks of tight-fought combat with brilliant enemy intelligence ever get old?
Read our Batman: Arkham Asylum review now
So, the “old” bits of Halo: ODST – where it’s just about playing Halo – work brilliantly. How about the new bits where you’re sneaking around? Not so good, sadly.
While your ODST rookie’s new visor mode works well, picking out enemies, enhancing low-light conditions and highlighting things to interact with, it’s not exactly a core stealth element. And stealth is something Bungie (the makers of all Halo games so far except realtime strategy Halo Wars) doesn’t seem to really get.
There’s no indication in Halo: ODST of when you’re successfully tucked into shadows or not. In response, enemy awareness flits between dozy and haphazard. At normal difficulty, you’ll have more fun just standing up and attacking most of the time.
It’ll pad the game out with more encounters, but there’s enough ammo and health packs around to just pile through everything you meet.
Exploration of the city is also mishandled. Halo games until now have been fairly “on rails”. Here, they let you work out how to cross New Mombasa from puzzle to puzzle. Shame, then, that most of the streets and courtyards in Halo: ODST seem to come from the same limited “burnt-out future city” palette. It’s all a bit samey.
Worryingly, as well as repeated bits of the same buildings, burnt-out cars etc. cropping up too regularly, some of the flashback setpieces also seem to steal liberally from old Halo games.
This feels like the tail end of a game series running out of ideas. And it’s as if Halo’s makers aren’t really sure of what to do other than big firefights. The easy answer should have been: more, new big firefights.
Still, what firefights there are are still absolutely brilliant. And Firefight, the new multi-player mode ripped nearly straight off Gears Of War’s Horde, is also great fun.
Halo: ODST features lots of epic combat to recommend it, just storm through the stealth bits as quick as you can to get to it.
