When Halo 3: ODST was first proposed, it was easy to get the impression that the game would be little more than an excuse to reuse some assets and build hype for the inevitable sequel to the last “proper” title in the series.  As time went on, it slowly became obvious that while Bungie wasn’t using its newfound freedom as a studio to take a big step away from the Halo franchise, it certainly didn’t want to be reduced to an ATM machine.  ODST was designed to make a splash.

The novels in the Halo series often get brushed off by the majority of gamers, but anyone who takes the time to delve into the expanded fiction would find that there are some interesting stories to be told.  The subject of Halo 3: ODST is one piece of this fiction which is often overlooked in the shadow of Master Chief’s story.  With Master Chief saving the universe, the ODST’s have plenty of room to do what they can to save Earth.

Doing what you can to save Earth, Rookie-style

The game begins with your primary character being introduced to a squad of ODST’s ready to drop into a huge Kenyan metropolis.  As a new lance corporal known simply as “The Rookie”, you hop into your heat-shielded pod and hurdle towards Earth’s surface to counter the Covenant invasion force.  About halfway down, one of the three principal leaders of the Covenant Empire takes his flagship into Slipspace within the atmosphere of Earth, which unleashes a devastating EMP blast that washes over your pod.  Robbed of their power, the pods containing your whole squad aimlessly crash to the surface, leaving you knocked out and alone in the darkening streets of New Mombasa.

The most immediate change a player might recognize as The Rookie drops out of his pod onto the pavement of a city street is that there’s a city to explore.  With your squad split up and the radio eerily silent, you are left to search the dark, bombed-out city for a familiar face.  Since you were knocked out in your pod on the way down, you emerge several hours from the initial drop and the aftertaste of action in the air is pungent.

The search begins

Exploring the city is some lonely business.  With few enemies to dispatch and limited shortcuts across the landscape, a fair amount of time is left for The Rookie to see the sights and take in the atmosphere.  And boy, there sure is some atmosphere.

The previous Halo games were well known for taking place on a grand stage where too epic a tale was being told for there to be time for introspection and intrigue.  The score is noticeably different in ODST, with the composter Marty O’Donnell obviously cognizant of the major change in tone from one title to the next.  Quiet piano tracks and soft tones follow you every step of the way through New Mombasa, pushing an air of loneliness and curiosity to the core of your senses.

The lighting is another subtle yet drastic change imposed on this Halo title.  With much of the time spent in the city during the night, you have the opportunity to avoid groups of enemies by taking refuge in the shadows.  In order to see as you lurk about, your visor is equipped with light enhancement features that actually do a little more than make it brighter for you.  When activated, your visor actually puts a colored highlight on the edges of most objects, structures, and creatures.  With red highlights attributed to enemies, blue to vehicles, green to allies, and yellow to structures, your visor can truly be a godsend when trying to parse the elements of the environment while trying to develop some workable strategies.

Between the lighting, score, and plot, it’s seemingly inevitable that ODST be observed for its step into the noir creative space.  While the Rookie is hardly Philip Marlowe, it’s hard not to feel like a young gumshoe while activating your visor in dark corners looking for any indication of the location of your squadmates.  When you do find an artifact of a battle fought seemingly so long ago, the camera draws out from the first-person perspective and peers directly at your character, which seems to observe whatever object he finds on some sort of soulful, microscopic level.  With each discovery comes a flash of insight, perhaps, that drives you to take command of one of the missing squadmates in a battle fought earlier that day.

It may not be saving the Universe, but it still feels pretty good

With each “flashback”, you take control of another member of the Rookie’s squad in an encounter that helped produce the world that you have the ability to explore.  The style of these battles is very similar to that of Halo 3, though if you try to fight exactly like a SPARTAN might, your ODST will certainly pay the price.

 As an ODST, your armor isn’t nearly as resilient as the MJOLNIR suit you may be familiar with.  You have no shields, but you do have “stamina” which allows you to absorb a handful of bullets before you begin to really feel the pain.  This game was originally titled “Halo 3: Recon” for a reason – you’re much better suited to fighting from afar or with guerilla techniques.

One of the more jarring changes from Halo 3 to ODST is the weapon balancing, which totally changes the hierarchy of what may be useful to particular play-types.  To begin with, two new weapons have been added to the mix: the M6C/SOCOM pistol and the M7S Caseless Submachine Gun.  The former is a highly accurate silenced pistol that is a call back to the M6C in the original Halo: Combat Evolved, while the latter is a silenced version of the SMG originating in Halo 2 that also has a scope and much improved range.  Long-time Halo fans will also find that many familiar weapons are tweaked in ultimately game-changing ways – the carbine is markedly more devastating, the shotgun is no longer a guaranteed one-hit kill machine, and the list goes on.  The general feeling of these changes seems to complement the change in the stars of the show, with long-range weapons being more effective, short-range weapons being toned down, and unique weapons being more generally useful.

The “flashbacks” all tend to have a different pace from one to the next, some highlighting different types of vehicular combat, others pitting you against hordes of enemies on a large battlefield, and a handful driving you along a path with multiple plot-based objectives.  While the overworld section of the game is largely new to the Halo franchise, these segments tend to take a dip into each different aspect of the battles that Halo is well known for.

An epic tale, a chilling thriller, or something in between?

When it comes down to it, Halo 3: ODST will be under the magnifying glass for what it does to advance the Halo fiction.  Simply put, it does quite a bit.

Each of the flashbacks fills in another piece of the puzzle that you’re trying to solve and ultimately combines into a pretty cohesive linear story.  Some of your squadmates aren’t really memorable, but two of them certainly are.  Captain Veronica Dare and Gunnery Sergeant Edward Buck both have big personalities and are played by two big actors, Tricia Helfer and Nathan Fillion.  The back-and-forth of their relationship is a little bit cliché, but there’s still something charming about romance on the battlefield.

As you’re exploring the overworld as the Rookie, the city’s artificial intelligence reveals itself to you as it leads you to audio logs of a young lady trying to find her bearings amid the alien invasion.  This side story gives collectors a rewarding look into some of the deeper fiction of ODST and reveals the strong characters of Sadie, the girl in the story, and the “superintendent”, the city’s AI.  With a comparable amount of voice acting to the regular course of the game, it’s obvious that plenty of thought was put into something that really serves fans of the franchise.

The entirety of the story fills in some minor plot holes of the series as a whole, but sealing the cracks wasn’t all this game was meant to do.  It takes a cast of fairly typical soldiers and shows that they have a place in the Halo universe to do extraordinary things.  It also shows that not all conflicts come out with you as the most clear-cut winner, which runs contrary to the original trilogy which made the player a seemingly invincible, godlike character who could do no wrong.  Hopefully, ODST marks a change in the franchise that will set future titles on a more believable footing.

ODST – Odious Tea or Oh! Da beSt Tea?

One of the most frustrating things about the original Halo series is that while changes were being implemented and some elements evolved, each game felt surprisingly similar to the next.  ODST breaks that trend with a big twist on the same old formula.  The atmosphere of the game has clear roots to noir cinema which certainly marks a groundbreaking shift in mood for the series.  The story is far less grand but far more pointed than the previous games, focusing in on a group of characters in a much smaller arena.  The weapons feel familiar, yet some subtle changes have been made that seem to make the experience feel much tighter.  All in all, Halo 3: ODST takes some gambles and doubles its money.  It keeps all of the memorable aspects of the Halo franchise and yet still manages to provide a fresh, new take on a familiar favorite.  As far as the campaign is concerned, I’d recommend this to anyone who maybe got tired of Halo after the jarring cliffhanger in Halo 2 and wants to get back into the fray, any diehard Halo fans, or really anybody who wants to play an atmospheric, solid first-person shooter with a core infrastructure that has been time-tested and progressively refined.