This review has been done many times since the release of Halo 3 on September 25, 2007, but has yet to be overdone. Halo 3 is liked just as much as it is disliked, and now with even more online interaction between the Xbox Live gamers, and its wide range of functionalities, the devide is probably greater than ever. Now Halo 3 has much more to offer then the previous games in its series, it gives the player everything the Xbox 360 was made to do. It utilizes the file sharing that no other game had implemented at the time, which gave it a huge edge in the race for game of the year.

Starting with the offline characteristics, Halo 3 has the so-called ending of the series with John-117 crash landing back on earth to finish the fight with the covenant armada. You first meet with sergeant Johnson (of course) and the rest of his platoon out in the jungle where you immediately jump into battle. This is probably a better start to the game seeing as it follows directly where halo 2 ended, giving the player a sense that he hasn’t missed anything.

The game continues with Cortana continuously interrupting you as venture through the levels destroying anything that crosses your path, but when she does butt in she gives information as to what is going around you, and what you have yet to come into contact with. The campaign follows through ten different levels as you get closer to the ending you have been waiting for since you first saw master chief gliding towards earth from the covenant ship. In a final statement about the campaign I can say that it invelops everything Bungie promised to their players and that it improved everything from Halo 2 to the next generation of consoles.

Taking a look outside the campaign basis it includes a bonus for the players who have completed it several times. As in every Halo game, they put these secret skulls in some of the levels for players to find in order to acquire the Hyabusa armour and to add to the Meta games.

The Halo 3 meta games are a nice addition to the Halo 3 campaign, giving the player a chance to redo the campaign once more and still have fun. The meta games are basically adding a score to your campaign depending on how good you’re doing in each level. As you have probably guessed, dying gives you a penalty for negative points and killing enemies gives you positive ones. Here is where the skulls come into play for Halo 3. As you find more you will find that each of them alter the campaign difficulty slightly or just tamper with interactions (example of this is the grunt party). The more skulls you add onto the difficulty, the larger the multiplier you will receive at the end of the level.

With Halo 3 having the largest online functionality, there will be a lot of points to review. Let’s start with the fact that it has one of the largest communities for an online FPS game so that you’re almost never left playing the same people/person twice. The Bungie site records an average of 2 million games a day and with everything that is available to you through Halo 3 and Xbox Live, that is a lot of interaction around the world.

One of the main characteristics about the online is the ranking system by using military rankings for how much experience you have and level ranking for how good you are against players around your skill level. This is used in many games but Halo 3 is the first to give you two different kinds of ranks while still only playing one matchmaking playlist.

The media sharing is one of Halo 3’s strongest points on the online community, seeing as you are able to share pretty much anything you create, capture or design. Many players that own Halo 3 use it mainly for that reason, which in turn gives all players the ability to brag about their skills and actually have proof of it. With the media sharing comes video recording; every game that you play gets stored up to a certain point. This allows you to go review the game as any of the players, move around as a free roaming camera, record specific clips (or a whole game) and take photos. Everything that you can see is what everyone else can see.

With everything pretty much set to go there is one more function about Halo 3 that has to be heard and that is Forge Mode. Forge is a map editor that allows you to edit the maps any way you please within a specified budget and then play them, and even share them with everyone who views your shared folder. There are infinite possibilities with this editor so you as long as you have a creative mind you could create the newest viral map.

Halo 3 is a great game for mostly everything, whether it’s looking for casual gaming with friends or hardcore gaming with rivals.

By Matt Arsenault