Has anyone played this? I grabbed it last week and got through a bunch of it.

I didn't play the SP for 2 or 3, but it seems like the Halo tradition of resuing architectural assets is alive and well...

You play as the Rookie, a voiceless new ODST (Orbital DropShip Trooper), who gets blown off-course during a botched insertion. You wake up 6 hours after landing and wander around the city of New Mombassa to reunite with your squad. You find artifacts of earlier events that you were unconscious during, which prompt "flashbacks" from the POV of various squadmembers in that particular location.

What I don't like about this gameplay element is that you walk through the areas for the first time as the squad (in the flashback) and then you walk through as the rookie. But it should be in reverse, because as the Rookie, the player should have no knowledge of the city.

Anyway, a lot of the things look the same due to these flashbacks. Also, it's weird shooting aliens while anime-take-on-film-noir-esque smooth jazz type music plays in the background. I want to feel like a badass! I guess they're trying to appeal to other demographics.

A few set pieces do feel very polished and realistic, though, especially on high difficulty settings. I really felt like I was in a Neil Blokampf (sp?) Halo movie:



Also, Multiplayer Firefight rocks.

it's orbital drop shock trooper

Not going to comment on the game because I haven't played it, but the music from the previous games was something me and my housemate really enjoyed. There was one section in Halo 2 that stands out in my mind as you entered a large circular room with a horde of bad guys and metal music started playing which made you feel awesome. We actually got ourselves killed a few times after we got past it just so we could play it again.

Does ODST have co-op?

Ars Technica's review pretty much assured I will not be getting it.

Yes, it has COOP, but apparently the entire single player campaign is 5 hours or less, including side stuff, depending on the difficult you play it on. COOP is not explained in the storyline at all, and seems tacked on at the last second.

****. Are they charging full price for that?

Halo is and always has been overrated crap.

It's a full priced game.

Maybe you should find a thread about something like you like instead of acting obnoxious in this one

True. How it ever got as popular as it is blows my mind. It just ISN'T FUN.

How's it not fun?

The way I view it is Bungie just trying to milk $60 out of a $10 map pack because you get Halo Mythic, which is Halo 3 sans the singleplayer. But by no means am I defending this bull****.

I think Halo is fun. I'll probably buy this.

I'm no fan of the regular Halo, but this game was just awesome.

I loved the jazzy music. Very detective-ish (which is what they were going for). It felt nice.

It's too bad they stuck with the Halo universe. Had it a better story (not just one of expansion-quality) and a new unique universe, it would have been wicked. The Halo aliens seemed out of place in this otherwise fantastic "anime-take-on-film-noir-esque" game.

Loved it. I do agree with other comments - flashbacks were meh. I do recall though, being able to go through some of the city before reaching a flashback moment, in which we went through the areas we'd just crossed through as the Rookie. I guess it depends on where you go to get there?

The thing about Halo...

Halo hasn't really put together a good "We're saving the world/universe/our lives" storyline since the first one. Everything since then is too focused on "more and more battling of the same enemies.

I never saw Halo as a story-driven game. The Halo story originally sucked. And I was so okay with that because I really enjoyed the action. As a huge advocate for gameplay over graphics and rich storytelling, this was a very significant exception.

Now that they're trying to vivisect Halo and slap on a deeper story... it just doesn't feel (to me) like it fits.

This is basically Microsoft's way of seeing just how little content they can put into a game before people will refuse to pay full price. Frankly, this passed the line by about 5 miles.

Agreed, it does seem a bit rude to charge full price for this. Chances are it'll sell well though...

It's selling here at £30 rather than £40, but it's not worth more than £15 if you ask me. And that's at a push.

Halo is just too floaty for me, and the enemies are too cutesy.

I've played ODST and I must say it's pretty good.

Also, Halo 1 PC was the best Halo experience. No exceptions.

Maybe many, many years after it came out when computers existed that could actually run it smoothly at a decent resolution. Damn ****ty port job.

went to walmart, spotted this, laughed

While the subsequent efforts were unsatisfying, I found the original Halo on Xbox to be quite enjoyable. The single player, while nothing completely original, had no major flaws and was entirely enjoyable (except for the Library, eek). In addition, I had a lot of good times playing 16 players on 4 TVs with my buddies at work. We "invented" a lot of fun games involving truck races, tank battles, and other unusual rules.

I had a lot of fun with two players, one trying to dodge rockets in the flying thingy. >_>

I think the video is truly amazing. Id love to be part of a team that worked on that.

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that store needs to replace their worn out/broken placeholder cases

anyway... rented it yesterday and played through a bit of the single player (the first bit as the rookie and the first flashback) thought it was decent though ammo for the human weapons seems to be considerably more scarce than in the other halo games found myself running out of ammo just as number 2 of that first hunter pair started chasing me around nothing like running away from a hunter while trying to find something better than a damn plasma pistol

Halo is one of the most overrated video games of all-time. I played this for 5 minutes and couldn't stand it just like all the other ones.

then post in your own thread about how halo sucks?

Nope, this one seemed fine to post my opinion.

I can think of 27 million people who think Temperamental is wrong

Every game ever is overrated.

I mean seriously I don't get it. It's just like every other first person shooter. You have a gun, point and shoot. Enemy is dead. Everything else is just a variable. How is that overrated? **** COD is overrated.

But I heard there is no match making MP on this ODST, is this true?

yeah but it is possible a significant number of those people think halo is overrated

it is possible to think something is overrated while still liking it especially when you have quite a few people who are all "OMG BEST GAME EVAR!!!111" while the game is not even close but at the same time it's an enjoyable game

wut

read

gooder engrish prease

my english is quite good... maybe you should have amy explain it to you

I would bet there are equal amounts of people that would agree with me.

The reason I think it's overrated is that it's just another Crysis. A FPS with shiny graphics. It brought nothing new to the genre that wasn't done before, it didn't break any barriers, and it didn't revolutionize the genre. Compare Goldeneye to see what I mean. The graphics were amazing (at the time), the soundtrack was fantastic, and the story was also superbly written (for a video-game especially) but beyond that, it was nothing but a regular FPS.

This doesn't mean the original Halo wasn't a good game, but it wasn't enough to make me scream giddily like all the other fanboys out there do.

Part of the reason Halo still remains big is because it's a good group game. Four people can play multiplayer and two on co-op. There aren't many good FPSs that allow for that. If Call of Duty had 4 player MP I would never touch Halo again.

That being said, the Firefight mode in ODST makes me want to touch Halo.

Not every game has to revolutionize gaming. If that were the case, and every game met this requirement, gaming would have been dead long ago.

Besides, Halo has never been about shiny graphics, so your comment means nothing. It's one of the ugliest next-gen games. The games have decent artwork (I particularly like ODST's style) but the technology behind the game isn't very impressive.

Jodo is right though. You name another game that offers the offline experience this gen that can compare to Halo...... yeah didn't think of any, did you?

Now I don't particularly like most of the Halo games (especially the first...) and I don't fanboy over them, but I really enjoyed the ODST campaign. You almost sound like you're judging the game for the sheer reason that it's a Halo game. tsk tsk

I mean, playing for a mere 5 minutes is proof enough that you never even considered it being, at the very least, a half-decent game.

Anyway, Firefight was pretty nifty. I played it for nearly longer than the campaign, just got hooked

I just played it round a mates house. Its fun, though a lot harder than Halo 1-3 as you dont play as awesome cybernetic John SPartan

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