Pleasantly surprised. This game is way more than just a Halo 3 expansion and has an unique take on what Halo can be like. Half the game is spent exploring the New Mombasa streets at night, with a particularly beautiful soundtrack and ambience setting the mood right for what is you, a rookie soldier, looking for his buddies all alone.
The other half of the game is played through flashbacks of what the other ODSTs were doing as you find clues to their wereabouts and has more of the typical Halo tone.
But there's something else adding to the game, and it's that you don't play as a Spartan. You have a threshold before you truly lose health, but when you do, we're back to looking for med packs instead of having everything recharge. It's like going back to CE but weaker, as under the right circumstances even Grunts can be threatening. During the times in which you're alone, you really have to use the environment to your advantage, and when you're not, it truly feels like you're part of the group instead of the big savior that keeps them safe. This is the game where losing allies to gunfire hurts the most.
Something else that I find really noteworthy is the use of audio logs, they are really good and tell another story that happened just before you came down. It is not essential, but the context added and the storytelling in them is great, takes some effort to get all of them but I would say try it.
This is the game where I found the issues with MCC to be most prevalent though (UPDATE: Reach is worse), constant audio syncing issues and weird stutters all around. This is a fault of the port, not the game, but it did hurt it a bit.
All in all though this is a very interesting Halo experience with a different perspective that's worth the time you can put into it, it may not be the highest point of the franchise but it succeeds in what it wants to do. Plus, we got Firefight from this, which is a big bonus.
It just hits different...
The other half of the game is played through flashbacks of what the other ODSTs were doing as you find clues to their wereabouts and has more of the typical Halo tone.
But there's something else adding to the game, and it's that you don't play as a Spartan. You have a threshold before you truly lose health, but when you do, we're back to looking for med packs instead of having everything recharge. It's like going back to CE but weaker, as under the right circumstances even Grunts can be threatening. During the times in which you're alone, you really have to use the environment to your advantage, and when you're not, it truly feels like you're part of the group instead of the big savior that keeps them safe. This is the game where losing allies to gunfire hurts the most.
Something else that I find really noteworthy is the use of audio logs, they are really good and tell another story that happened just before you came down. It is not essential, but the context added and the storytelling in them is great, takes some effort to get all of them but I would say try it.
This is the game where I found the issues with MCC to be most prevalent though (UPDATE: Reach is worse), constant audio syncing issues and weird stutters all around. This is a fault of the port, not the game, but it did hurt it a bit.
All in all though this is a very interesting Halo experience with a different perspective that's worth the time you can put into it, it may not be the highest point of the franchise but it succeeds in what it wants to do. Plus, we got Firefight from this, which is a big bonus.
It just hits different...