ODST: Campaign Review

Halo 3 ODST: Campaign Mode

It’s quick. It’s kind of like a “Wham, Bam, Shit I’m out of ammo I have to pick up that damn Needler until I run into a decent weapon, Thank you Ma’am” sort of thing.

This is short, much like the campaign, and doesn’t have anything about Multiplayer in it.

I played through on easy, because I truly am a rookie when it comes to Halo. I was the girl in system-link campaign mode for the last game to stand back and snipe because one of us had to stay alive for half of the campaign.

The opening cinema has some familiar voices (Nathan Fillion, Alan Turdyk, Tricia Helfer and Adam Baldwin) and their respective characters are all marines in your squad. As The Rookie you are dubbed the strong and silent type, and that is what you are. (Though I must admit, I did miss walking around as Master Chief.)

The squad gets dropped into New Mombasa, and things go awry. Everyone gets separated and the journey to find each other, preferably alive, is on–then complete the original mission.

The chapters go on in a series of flashbacks and current time. You start out playing as The Rookie, always in current time, and walk around finding evidence of where your squadron is, eventually meeting up with them and staying the playable character for the last few chapters. For the first few hours, the chapters are staggered: Rookie, Buck in a flashback, Rookie, Dutch in a flashback, Rookie, Mickey in a flashback, etc…

It added variety to the six or so hours* it ended up taking me to complete the game. I encountered the same old enemies, still ugly and stupid, with their shiny weapons that were plentiful in ammo compared to the regulation weapons. And, of course, there are the Warthogs, Scorpions and Covenant vehicles to use at certain points.

Overall, the campaign mode felt like a hefty expansion pack to Halo 3. Enjoyable, but short, with a nice, tight story to it. If it was expanded then it could possibly stand on its own, but as is it’s much too short to consider it a strong stand-alone campaign.

*The 360 I was playing on decided that the disc was unreadable at times–hey, it happens– but instead of my checkpoints loading correctly I was always put back at my manual saves… which was very, very early on in the game. This happened twice, until I learned to manually save every other level. I have no idea what my actual play time is.

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