Bungie Takes Us Through Halo 3: ODST

Chief's on vacation but the fight's far from finished! Bungie's Lars Baaken opens the door to the first standalone Halo expansion, as we seek answers and get hands-on time.

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In keeping with the softly-softly mindset, your default loadout is a silenced pistol and SMG. As feeble as these look, feel and sound, they can be devastating when used in tandem, as we find out when we eventually jostle our way to a control pad. The SMG makes short work of Grunt mobs and tears down personal shields like an enraged alleycat, while a carefully aimed pistol shot can rip somebody's head clean off.

Summarising Firefight as Gears of War 2's Horde mode with brighter colours may occlude a lot of vital intricacies, but the core idea is the same: hold back the tide of AI troops for as long as you can. Matches are broken up into sets, each containing three rounds which are further broken down into five Covenant waves. The make-up of each wave is random, broadly speaking, but it's possible to detect a touch of Left 4 Dead's "AI director" in the matching of enemy types for maximum inconvenience. A pair of Hunters surrounded by swarms of Drones is a nasty proposition indeed. The fifth and final wave of each round also infallibly contains several Brute Chieftans, armed with Grav Hammers, Fuel Rod Guns, jet packs and stealth cloaks.

Players begin with a pool of seven lives to share between them, which is replenished by surviving waves. Health stations and weapon drops are clustered at one end of each map, and play accordingly takes on a familiar, bouncy rhythm as the ODST scuttle out to exploit mounted turrets, vantage points and other noteworthy features, then retreat to rearm and patch up in the lull between waves.

Some Covenant troops enter at ground level, but others are delivered in Phantoms with ferocious laser turrets, which adds a fresh layer of risk and reward as players strive to knock out the new arrivals while they're bunched around the drop-off point. Raising the stakes still further are Skulls, match handicaps such as better Covenant evasion or an unhealthy obsession with throwing grenades, which flick on in ever greater numbers as you progress through rounds.

The three Firefight maps on offer, ranging from a shut-in tiered circular arena through a sweeping grassy hillside to a two-pronged aircraft dock, are as replay-friendly as you'd expect from a developer whose last game routinely tops Xbox Live usage charts two years post-release. Vehicular action is notable by its absence, though we're able to mount and grenade-plant irritating Wraith tanks (at great personal risk) on the hillside map.

It's tremendously entertaining stuff, on the whole, and Halo 3 clans will doubtless plunge hundreds of hours into perfecting their survival strategies over the winter, but we soon realise that Bungie has simply rearranged an already award-winning multiplayer component to stay abreast of rival developments, and that it's in the campaign that ODST must earn its controversial $60 RRP. In this regard, we're comforted to hear Lars talk about the ODST storyline as an on-going project, tying in with that of the upcoming Halo: Reach (planet Reach is also mentioned briefly in a new ViDoc trailer): single player may be a bit of a blind spot at present, but you can rest assured that Bungie isn't in the business of piecemeal expansions.

Nor, it seems, need we worry that Reach, allegedly the final Bungie-produced Halo project on Xbox 360, will return the franchise to its well-plumbed thirty-seconds-of-fun comfort zone. "The Halo universe is so big, so vast, that you could do things conceivably that have never been done before but still completely within the Halo universe," comments Xbox Group Product Manager Ryan Crosby. "So I don't think you'd have to walk away from the Halo universe to make a big change - the change that happened here for ODST was kind of a small change, in terms of the primary character, the playable character, but it's conceivable that you could change a lot more and still fall very much within the fiction of Halo."

Nobody's saying exactly what that "big change" might be, naturally, but we're looking forward to making some informed deductions once Halo 3: ODST hits soil this September. Master Chief may be on his holidays, but the fight is far from finished.

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