Late Review of Halo 3

I picked up a copy of Halo 3 for cheap from this guy on Craigslist a few weeks ago, and finally got around to playing it. Spent maybe ten hours with the single-player campaign this weekend. My impression? Halo 3 is to shooters what Metallica is to metal. That is, it's not the best shooter ever, but it's well polished, has mass commercial appeal, and you could certainly do worse.

Somehow I never really played Halo 1 or 2. Sure, I played them multiplayer with folks, but that accounts for maybe ten hours of play time since Halo first came out back when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I'm no slouch on shooters, though - a quick trip down memory lane brings to mind:

• Doom 1, 2, and 3
• Quake 1, 2, and 3
  
• Unreal, Unreal Tournament, UT2k3, UT2k4
• Metroid Prime 3
• Dead Space (not first person, but possessing of many of the classic game mechanics)
  
• System Shock 2
• Bioshock
• Duke Nukem 3D
• Hexen
• Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay
• Portal (not really a shooter)
  
• Mirror's Edge (also not really a shooter)
• American McGee's Alice
• A couple of the GoldenEye games
• Perfect Dark
• Shogo
• Aliens vs Predator
• Tribes
  
• Probably a few more that aren't coming right to mind
  

So my point is, though I've never really played Halo, I'm appreciative of its place in the canon. I kind of dig a few of the game mechanics - For example, the idea of having a limited number of gun slots is pretty cool. It's well suited to the console, and makes weapon pickups a strategic thing. The same thing goes for the health system - it's simple, logical, and leads directly to some unique tactics.

I was never much of a Counterstrike-type guy. Played it some, but I didn't have the patience. Puzzles I'll sit for (Portal, Mirror's Edge, Braid, Tetris, every Zelda game and many Zelda-like games, etc etc), but the military-style tactics in CS never really floated my boat. Halo seems to be a little bit of a compromise. The player isn't nearly as fast as the Quake or Doom 0r UT guys, but not as slow or vulnerable as a Counterstrike player. The weapons are immediately fairly obvious in function and operation (I never wanted to swap out of Counterstrike to look up on Wikipedia whether realistic gun X was more powerful than realistic gun Y).

Best shooter ever. No. Pretty good. Yeah, sure. Worth my time? I've certainly found myself wanting to play another level today, if that's a good enough metric for you.