You’re once, twice, three times a hero...

There’s established rules with BIG sci-fi trilogies.

The first instalment is a self-enclosed story, setting the standard to universal acclaim. The sequel ups the ante to become a series; conveying deeper history, increasing iconography, and plotting a wider narrative that makes the epic original feel unambitious. A satisfying conclusion, however, is left for the third – which, while familiar, distils the essence, refines it, and wraps it up in style.

In film, Star Wars, The Matrix and Terminator all adhere to this template with varying success. Metal Gear Solid, meanwhile, has been about our best interactive example. Until now.

In Halo, gaming has its Star Wars trilogy. The Master Chief its iconic Darth Vader-like figure. The Assault Rifle its Lightsaber. And in Halo 3, Xbox 360 boasts Halo’s triumphant Return of the Jedi.

Superlative soup

What Halo does well, Halo 3 does very well indeed. No shooter boasts Halo’s superlative soup of balanced gunplay, artificial intelligence, sci-fi space opera, set pieces, vehicle combat, roving exploration, claustrophobic alien corridors and grandiose interstellar scale. Halo 3 elevates it all with the Xbox 360’s next-gen technology, and the results are spectacular.

It doesn’t boast Gears of War’s dystopian destroyed beauty, but Halo 3 is colourful, coherent and full of life, and the attention to detail shines. The sombre shadows, evocative faint glows and radiant pulses of Halo 3’s High Dynamic Range lighting are staggering, and compliment Halo 3’s shimmering water, fluid animation and cinematic direction, plus the inspiring orchestral score and snappy dialogue, perfectly; making Halo 3’s isolated battles feel part of a much larger galactic fray.

Halo 3’s weapons also enrapture. Old firearms return, bringing Halo 3 away from dual wielding and back to Bungie’s balance of firearm, melee and grenades. With the Assault Rifle again the best all-rounder, new turret weapons offering a cumbersome-but-powerful third-person option, and fresh Covenant arms (the Brute Hammer makes us smile every time), Halo 3 features the most diverse, fun FPS weapon set ever.

The same could be said for Halo 3’s vehicles, with familiar faves meeting new additions like the Brute Chopper and Mongoose – and offsetting both is Equipment, pioneered in May’s Halo 3 Beta; another masterful addition to the Master Chief’s arsenal.

And to the Arbiter’s. Though his story presence in Halo 3 is smaller, he follows you around the campaign, with a second player in co-op actually playing him. Moreover, in online co-op, players three and four control two additional Elites – all battling Halo 3’s main foe, the Brutes.

Short but sweet

Halo 3’s armoured Brutes are more imposing than past Halo Elites, though their lack of recharging energy shields makes them less sophisticated combatants. Yet, offsetting this, the Flood are improved in Halo 3 – while Halo 3’s environments, flying sections, and set pieces are bigger and better than ever. Halo 3, then, is the most epic, engaging and well-balanced in the series.

It’s just sad that it’s so short. Halo 3 took us 12 hours on singleplayer Heroic, and even less in co-op – though Legendary is still a monumental challenge (we’d recommend Heroic in singleplayer, and Legendary in co-op). Despite the brevity, however, Halo 3’s campaign is never less than stellar throughout, and finishes in the most satisfying way possible – while Achievements and hidden skulls assure replayability.

As with its forebears, however, Campaign is really only half the story. Halo 3’s online matchmaking multiplayer is something we’ve already detailed in our Preview, so we won’t dwell, except to say that it’s twelve – mostly new – maps retain the balance and style we’ve come to expect. Guardian, fans will be delighted to hear, looks destined to become the new Lockout.

It is Forge and Theatre, however, which make Halo 3 such a well-rounded package. The former an eight-player interactive level editor, it lets you disperse any number of insanities onto the fray; adding new weapons, vehicles and things like grav lifts as players battle around you. The moment you drop a tank on somone’s poor unsuspecting head, you’ll grin like a loon.

Ahead of the pack

But Halo 3’s Theatre is going to make the real Halo fans positively beam from ear to ear. Letting you replay, speed up, slow down, screenshot and record snippets of your best Halo 3 moments, it’s a montage-makers dream and will help more serious gamers improve by studying their mistakes. Sadly, campaign videos can’t be fast-forwarded or recorded, but you can share your campaign and editable multiplayer files with others, and access it all from Bungie.net – which just shows how far ahead of the pack Halo 3 really is.

In all, Halo 3 is a shining example of how to complete a trilogy, of a first-person shooter and, indeed, of a videogame. It’s not flawless, and at times feels like an homage to past Halos, but is more polished than its older brothers, and delivers some of the most memorable moments in videogame history.

GAME's Verdict

• The most polished of all three Halos, with genre-defining first-person gunplay and standard-setting four-player co-op
• Immense Xbox Live multiplayer
• Forge and Theatre represent two of the most incredible added-value modes in a game.

• It may be the most polished, but Halo 3 is also the shortest in the Halo series.
• Brutes simply aren't as sophisticated to fight against as past Halo's Elites.
• It's a real shame that Theatre mode doesn't quite offer full movie-manipulating freedom across multiplayer AND campaign clips.

Review by: Mark Scott
Review Published: 03.10.07

Mark puts Bungie’s Halo 3 Beta through its paces...

Having been playing the Halo 3 Beta for a week now, my initial impressions have been confirmed. Halo 3 is, in fact, a lot like Halo 2, offering subtle new additions which add to the experience without intangibly corrupting the Halo formula.

Somewhat disappointing, however, are the visuals in the Beta, which wear Halo 2’s heritage a little too starkly. The art style is familiar, architecture and Master Chief character models instantly recognisable, and it all appears to be a shinier, HD form of its forebear.

However, when you get up close you begin to smile at the details; weaponry floats downstream on immaculately rendered shimmering water, freshly fragged foes ragdoll violently in front of you, and Bubble Shields deploy in all their light-refracting glory.

Forever blowing up bubbles

Indeed, the Bubble Shield represents Halo 3’s single most iconic change. A giant ammo-absorbing transparent dome, firepower can neither pass into or out of it, meaning you can drop it when you’re taking a pounding and take cover inside – unless of course your foe decides to mosey on in for a bit of up-close melee action.

It’s not just the Bubble Shield either; there’s a shield-lowering Energy Drainer, Tripmine and a rather nifty Portable Grav Lift too, all useable with the X button. Indeed, the latter two both work as effective offensive weapons when placed in front of an oncoming enemy Warthog – or the vehicle’s new smaller variant, the two-man quadbike-esque Mongoose.

With X now taken up by the new functionality, picking up and reloading weapons has shifted to the bumper buttons. It’s an intuitive change which allows for independent reloading of dual-wielded weapons, but it does take some getting used to, and in my first hour saw plenty of attempted reloads turning into hilarious tripmine-induced suicide-betrayal moments.

Speaking of explosives, grenades have not escaped Bungie’s painstaking refinement process. A new Spike Grenade falls somewhere between the human Frag and the sticky Covenant Plasma; able to wedge in flat surfaces and, indeed, attach to players themselves for instant kills. Frags and Plasmas too have been overhauled, boasting new texture-sensitive properties, so they now bounce differently depending on the surface you use them on.

Contrasts in the killing fields

Which probably had a hand in Bungie’s decision to go with three such contrasting maps for the Beta. High Ground, a sandy, crumbling hill-topped Planet Earth fort, owes a lot to Halo 2’s Zanzibar, and feels incredibly different to Snowbound; a fittingly white landscape on a seemingly alien world boasting a perimeter of Covenant gun turrets, and a series of energy shielded underground rooms which necessitate far closer combat than the ostensibly open surface.

Lastly, Valhalla is an eye-watering ground-up re-edit of the classic Blood Gulch and Coagulation. Set in a now forest-green canyon, its wide-open expanses, rocky outcrops, dual base Man-Cannoning goodness and vehicle quota offer by far the best example of Halo 3’s new gameplay components coming together.

Which brings us to Matchmaking. Largely, it’s the same as Halo 2, with ranked and unranked options for solo and team play, but with the option to Veto (that is, vote against) Matchmade selections. Got a level and gametype combo you don’t like? Simply press X, and if a majority (5 or more – the Beta is limited to 8 players per game) agree, the game will select a new match. Be warned though, you’re stuck with whatever comes up next, so use those Vetoes wisely people!

So much said and yet little mention of weapons. The Assault Rifle returns from Halo 1 as your standard artillery piece, while much of the Halo 2 arsenal (Energy Sword aside) makes an appearance in the Beta, largely the same though slightly rebalanced for power.

Brute Spiker beats paper

New additions include the Brute Spiker, a Covenant variation on the SMG, and the much talked-about Spartan Laser, which takes a few seconds to charge, but then instant kills any player it touches. In all, the Beta boasts yet another brilliantly weighted ballistic feast, but with the Bubble Shield thrown into the mix, makes for an increasingly deep paper-scissors-stone that the best players and biggest Halo fans will happily lose hours of their life to.

Or, more precisely, the next three weeks. Even with Bungie recently extending it by four days, the Halo 3 Beta will still be over all too soon for the Halo series’ legion of adoring followers. The great news though is that we won’t have long to wait when it does; with Halo 3 recently confirmed for September 26th, we’ll all be experiencing the Master Chief’s third outing far sooner than predicted. Summer can’t come and go fast enough.

Preview by: Mark Scott
Preview Published: 18.05.07