I was gonna shoot my way out. Mix things up a little.

Sunday, September 30, 2007

A particular thought ran through my mind during the second mission of Halo 3: "Wow, this game was made by professionals." And then on the penultimate mission: "No, this game was made by Bungie." Those two things are not always one and the same. When professionals make a game, it has a smooth frame rate, well-balanced weapons and cunning enemy AI. Halo 3 possesses all these things. What it also has, to qualify as a Bungie game, is the Flood. Not just a few sections of Flood, but an entire level dedicated to those horrible monsters.

No Halo player enjoys facing the Flood. They are ugly, mute, uninteresting and overpowered enemies whose continued inclusion in the Halo series feels like some kind of loyalty test from Bungie. Unlike the Covenant forces you usually square off against, the Flood does not spawn in waves from dropships. Instead they appear behind doorways, pop right out of the ground, and - new to Halo 3 - evolve from Flood corpses that you just killed three seconds ago. "If you truly love Halo," says Bungie, "you'll put up with an entire Flood level just to say you've finished our game." And so, like a coke fiend desperate for his next fix, we submit.

The only positive aspect of having the Flood around is that it makes the rest of the game really shine. Plus I get validation on my 90% score prediction. Sure, Gamespot gave Halo 3 a 9.5, but I can justify giving the game a 90% all by myself. It's very simple. There are ten levels in Halo 3. One of them is a non-stop torture fest filled with the Flood. The remaining nine are good levels. Thus, 90%. I don't care about the online component, so this score feels pretty good to me.

Except I don't score games on a 100 point scale, making Halo 3 even easier to judge. It's a four star game, no question. For a real change of pace this time around, let's focus on the positive aspects of Halo 3 (seeing as how I'm done bitching about the Flood).

All the reviews I've read that complain about Halo's graphics are quick to qualify that the art direction is wonderful and the frame rate is perfectly smooth. This is all true, but I for one was actually impressed with Halo's graphics. Are they going to blow your mind like Gears of War? No, absolutely not. But the lighting very well might. Halo 3 makes liberal use of high dynamic range lighting to let the shadows creep and the daylight burst in. You'll be squinting at the TV in delight. Colored lighting appears to be making a comeback. Red emergency light angrily bathes the chief's armor in Bungie's carefully orchestrated cut scenes. Purple cascade explosions from plasma grenades are terrifying to watch as they arc towards you. And when a Scarab tank or Phantom dropship explodes, the world turns white as a tiny new sun suffers a painful birth.

The audio in the game definitely has its ups and downs. On the up side are the explosions, weapons fire and battle chatter. Now endowed with full Havoc physics, Bungie has given every Covenant grunt more plasma grenades than he knows what to do with. You'll often get rushed by suicidal grunts carrying a grenade in each hand. When they blow up something else does too, and if you're lucky it's probably gonna be the rest of their squad. The destruction of the battlefield rips briskly through your speakers; every shattered window and blown tire can be heard individually. The same applies to your squad mates - they'll complement you on a good headshot and call "shotgun!" when you leap in the car. I've even heard them point out incoming enemy vehicles that I hadn't noticed.

Suffering for these audio successes is the dramatic dialogue. Whenever a cut scene occurs, or - even worse - when Cortana's hologram shows up to deliver what Bungie must have thought was some super portentous speech... well, get ready for amateur hour. It's not nearly as bad as Metroid Prime 3, it's just wooden. Miranda Keys has always sounded like a second rate Cortana, but now she's not alone. Seargent Johnson is a black badass no longer; he sounds as gruff and passionate as an underpaid file clerk. The Master Chief is bored and subdued, like he's overdue for some shore leave. Worst of all is Cortana herself. Not the voice actress - she does the best job of everyone by far - but the kind of self-important crap they had her read is more embarrassing than Miranda Keys' teleprompter-style droning. Sample quotes:

"I have defied gods and demons."
"Would you sacrifice me to complete your mission? Would you watch me die?"
"This place will be your home. This place will be your tomb."

I picture a Bungie writer self-fellating while he types up this rubbish. Clearly he doesn't realize that the rest of us have lived without a Cortana statue on our monitors for the last three years, making our emotional attachment to this AI difficult to summon from the ether. Every time Cortana took over my view screen to look anguished or sexy or what have you I got to wondering when she would show up in the game proper. Surely they're going to let us interact with this wholly sentient AI at some point. And indeed they do: halfway through the second-to-last level Cortana is returned to us. She chatters at you for the final level and then that's it. Game over. Way to make us feel compassion, Bungie.

Still, Halo 3 is a winner for the overall level of polish it exudes. Like Gears of War before it, the game is indescribably fun. Enemies react well to your gunfire, giving you a real sense of having actually shot something. You get corridor gunplay and vehicle sections when you're tired of hoofing it. You take down giant tanks, entire regiments of ground troops and get to spend some time in the air with the Hornet helicopter and the traditional floaty physics of the Warthog jeep. I really have no complaints about the main campaign (that Flood level notwithstanding). You get to do everything you would ever want to do in a Halo shooter.

Technically one of the things you do is "finish the fight", just like all the commercials say. But do you? Since the failure condition is the eradication of all sentient life in the Milky Way galaxy and the final cinematic shows human beings talking to each other on Earth... yeah, I guess we won. But to claim that all the loose ends are wrapped up is madness. Did the humans blow up the Flood infested cruiser that landed in the town of Voi? Is the Master Chief himself a "Forerunner", or is 343 Guilty Spark mistaken because of the Mjolnir armor? What exactly is this "solution to the Flood" that Cortana thinks is beyond the dark portal? The bottom line, sadly, is that it doesn't matter. Unlike even Bioshock, you never feel like you're the one driving the plot. The Master Chief may be piloting the Warthog, but he's just a chauffeur, a slave behind the wheel. Now, would you kindly take out that anti-air Wraith?