Replayed this one with a buddy experiencing this for the first time, and he told me ODST was a phenomenal game until the last hour and I honestly agreed. Even on my first playthrough I thought the ending was abrupt and lacked impact, and Costal Highway is really not that good of a final mission. Doesn't help that MCC is completely missing the credits after campaigns, making this issue even worse when we were just immediately sent back to the main menu after the ending cutscene.

Despite that everything that comes before is incredible. Finding the clues of your lost squad members and seeing how they tie into the mission that you play as each of them is such a creative way to tell the story of this game. Although, it felt like the health system in this game, which I imagine the intention was to make the player feel weaker because you're not a spartan, actually felt like you could tank more hits before dying as Chief. Though perhaps it was because I was playing co-op. Or cuz I'm just too good at quickscoping covenant scrubs. #Pwned

Mild spoiler warning (of a specific level), but it's at the end, so proceed with minor caution.

This game was great. I have no idea how long I spent on it, but I loved it. Second favorite Halo game behind 2.

This game is a mystery story. I'm not sure I got that when I first started playing it; in fact, when I first started out, I'm not sure I got the premise at all! But in the past week, it dawned on me what exactly was going on, and it sold me immediately. The characters are fantastic, the story is interesting (especially Sadie's, which I don't think I've finished!), and the gameplay is intelligent and frantic, just like a Halo game should be. I forgot how much strategy goes into playing these games, and it really forces you to slow down and think about your next action (which gets increasingly harder to do after dying so many times!)

I was so relieved to find out I didn't have to face the Flood in this game. As badass as the ODSTs are, I'm not sure they would have survived! Speaking of which, this game does a fantastic job at making you feel vulnerable, something that was pointed out to me when I read the Wikipedia article on it. I was like "oh yeah," lol. But even so, I definitely felt a lot more vulnerable, and had to occasionally take moves incredibly carefully and specifically in order to break the death/checkpoint-load cycles I got myself trapped in occasionally (or frequently).

Favorite level was Buck and the team going to capture a Phantom. Loved that one.

I played the game on legendary so this is my legendary campaign review

Honestly even though they restrict a lot of your tools from halo 3 I actually had more fun with this legendary campaign. Being an odst and being overall weaker than a Spartan made the experience more fun for me. I also got all the audio logs which was really fun and tells a cool story. Exploring New Mombasa on legendary made the experience more tense as I felt like I was on my toes the whole time. Definitely recommend playing on legendary.

yknow i think i just have a problem with non-linear storytelling, or at least this specific way of doing it where you go find a "piece" of the story, then go find another completely separate piece that's not necessarily directly before or after the previous piece
it just kind of annoys me when i'm like "oh i wonder what happened to that guy" only to find another story piece where someone goes "...blah blah after he DIED blah blah..." and i'm just like "oh okay i guess he's dead now" and then i find another separate piece where it's like "oh no he might DIE?? what will HAPPEN?" and i already know exactly what will happen because the other story piece just fucking told me
anyways i found most of the pieces of this game in order so i actually liked it!
the core concept of looking for little pieces of evidence of your other squad mates and suddenly being like "i know EVERYTHING that happened now" is a little funny but the actual gameplay mechanic of playing through what happened, recontextualizing the areas of the game you just went through is pretty cool and i enjoyed it a lot
also you're NOT master chief which means you can't dual-wield weapons (this is the only gameplay change)
oh my god are these some of the most generic human designs ive ever seen, the squad leader guy straight up looks like some sort of human-proportioned minecraft steve recreation while the boss lady looks like she was designed by someone who doesn't know what women look like (and i dont mean that in a "male gaze" way i mean that in a "the designer was a gay man" way (i don't know who the character designer(s) actually was and i dont care enough to find out))

all in all though i enjoyed the concept, the story, and the gameplay and it wasn't even too long, the city walking sections were pretty alright despite me expecting them to drag on

cortana does NOT exist in this game

Esperava mais do jogo, ele tem ideias interessantes como mudar o sistema de vida dos ODST e você sente essa mudança com você sendo um pouco mais fraco, uma campanha as vezes isolada as vezes em guerra na cidade, você jogar com vários personagens, porém senti que durante a campanha faltou muito um objetivo pra história que so ficou claro na última missão e andar pela cidade com rookie so pra ver um pedaço do que aconteceu, jogar um trecho e depois repetir varias vezes pelo mapa sem fazer nada relevante com rookie é bem tedioso.

Eu quero um enginer 10/10 melhor alien

Flames crackle in the pale moonlight. They're scattered throughout the city's remains. Patrols of grunts and elites pollute the once bustling streets like a plague.
The whirring of overhead phantoms fill in the brief gaps of silence left by the deafening whisper of the wind.

Hissing, then a click. Your drop pod opens, and you're tossed into the ruins of New Mombasa. You're small. Not the hulking 9 foot master chief, but a humble footsoldier. And you're deep in enemy territory. The only sources of light the dim cerulean glow of the covenant's energy weapons. These aliens tower you in stature. They vastly outclass you in firepower, and their numbers are in the thousands. You're just a rookie with a submachine gun and a dream.

If humanity already lost this fight, what hope do you have?

The next ten hours are then spent conducting a one sided massacre on hundreds of giant aliens.

i think if i had played this game on launch i would be pissed

but as a dlc for the MCC?

man it's great i love mombasa and i finished a month ago and still hear the entire OST

It's more Halo 3 so whats not to love

although a not clear indicator of how much stamina you have killed me a couple times

I was so on board with the game in the first few hours, where roaming the city at night all by yourself finding out what happened to your team was absolute vibes. But it kinda quickly loses its luster as you find out that after a while, the city you explore doesn't have that much to offer. Everything kinda looks the same and the map turns out to be a lot smaller than you initially thought. The one upside to exploring the city is finding the audio logs. I did enjoy trying to find them and learning about its story, but after a while I just couldn't find anymore without having to resort to backtracking a huge part of the city which I didn't have the patience for, leaving the audio log story line to be unfinished and kinda left me blue balled.

None of the flashback missions were bad, but I also didn't find many of them to be that interesting or stand out. There was no mission in the game that was unique to this game that the previous games haven't already done. The setting gets very tiring to look at as 95% of the time you are just looking at city. I also wasn't really attached to any of the characters as you don't really spend much time with them or see them interact with each other that much. Also who's idea was it to make the final mission an escort mission.

Epilogue cutscene goes hard though.

Man, I feel so dumb for progressing one third of the game and only then realising that there was a night vision option in the game and I had to turn it on to see things clearly instead of roaming around like a blind bat for 33% of the game. There were some really dark rooms where I had to navigate and was clueless for the majority of the time. I like the atmosphere of the game, it's kind of different from the other halo games but sometimes it looks unpolished and the cutscenes were pretty bad in comparison to the rest of the franchise, the face models looked like they were made in early 2000s , one of the main characters almost looks like Claude from gta 3, it was that block shaped and the animations in the cutscenes didn't help much either. I guess this was made on a lower budget compared to the other halo titles. I wasn't that invested in the story too and the humor that they went for felt like a misfire imo. They tried to replicate the kind of humor Battlefield Bad Company 2 had (I know BF released later) but then the latter did it far better than ODST. The gameplay and level design was fun albeit short but there were a few repetitive segments in the pseudo open world where you have to keep finding clues to something, that really felt boring honestly. Overall I don't mind this game that much it was decent, I appreciate that it was shorter on length and distinguishes itself in certain aspects from the rest of Halo. And before I finish ranting I literally was not able to find a single health pack in this game, so playing it on heroic that low health indicator sound was ringing in my ears like a siren throughout the game.

The campaign for this game had a great aesthetic that I adore. The mission design was also good for the most part. The story was perfectly fine, however. I didn't hate it and it served its purpose. However it doesn't reach the emotional pains of Halo 2 or the bombastic feeling of Halo 3.

Firefight was a solid, yet difficult, distraction if you could find 3 other people to do a run with you. Sadly there was no matchmaking for this mode, which it desperately needed

A good side package overall, despite the price point at the time frustrating fans