Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta: Hands-On Preview

We tell you everything you need to know about Halo 3 Multiplayer in time for its public Beta release this week.

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The lobby system in Halo 3 unsurprisingly shows how online gaming should be done. The simplicity of Xbox Live's built-in features like integrated friends and inviting friends to a game underpin the experience, and standard features like chatting with your pals during set-up and gameplay make this sociable and fun. The lobby itself is uncomplicated and even in the limited release, overflowing with variety. The framework from Halo 2 survives, with standard Slayer deathmatches and variants such as awesomely fun Sniper-only and Rocket-only matches, plus matches like King of the Hill where you occupy a designated (and constantly reappearing) space for as long as possible. I've heard players online also suggesting that a Spartan Laser-only game would also be a barrel of laughs, though personally I've not yet managed to get this new, extraordinarily threatening weapon to work against other players as desired more than 10% of the time.

High Ground

I also don't see why the match mode isn't user definable at the moment. Categories of play (for example ranked or social, single entry or team entry) are called Playlists, and say you're really enjoying the Sniper-only bouts on the idyllic Valhalla stage, it could be a long wait until that combination comes up again while the game throws out other stuff like standard Slayer, King of the Hill, or whatever, on other stages. As far as I can make out you can't choose. Players entering a match do get the chance to majority 'veto' the selection made - but only for another random, non-vetoable second selection to be decided on by the system.

Team Slayer with classic Red versus Blue action will keep you playing for hours as all fans know, and team variants like CTF are also in the Beta, but Halo 3 promises even more ways to play that this teaser isn't revealing just yet. Whether you're pulling a friend into a standard free-for-all, or accepting an invite into somebody's team game, it's all exceedingly straightforward and we've never experienced a waiting time of more than a minute or so to get players lined up and into a game, regardless of whether our own friends were signed in. Besides, there's plenty to look at while you're waiting for players to assemble, thanks to an overhauled statistics system.

A comprehensive range of post-match stats are up for grabs as always, detailing who got killed the most, who wasted you most frequently, Killing Sprees, Double Kills, Assassinations and all the rest of it on a player-by-player basis, and the Beta then supposedly calculates your skill level a little more accurately than last time. Of course you don't have to look at all this - but it's definitely good to have there when you're trying to work out just how the hell 'Crazy Killa' got 25 frags and won a match in under three minutes - or indeed, in our case, how fellow magazine and website staff might be stacking up against/humiliating our own performance. During the game, holding down the back button brings up an essential summary box of frags, and from here you can mute different players' voices as well. Elsewhere in the lobby, there's also the standard option to completely customise your Spartan soldier's colours and his emblem.

The new maps are impressive, yet will all seem familiar to players of Halo 2. High Ground is a radiant, sun-baked natural area with no specific pattern, and complicated multi-level architecture dotted around that has been blown apart in places - it's like a visual cross between MotorStorm and the Metal Gear Solid 4 trailer. It's fun to navigate around, and there are plenty of nooks, crannies and pipes to hide in or take cover to snipe. Snowbound is a white world that combines a large snowy outdoors with intriguing alien-like indoor areas, accessible via gates that you can simply pass through even though bullets and grenades cannot (a bit like the all-new Bubble Shield - more on that in a bit). Valhalla is perhaps the most visually glorious: similar to one of Halo 1's most popular outdoor multiplayer maps if memory serves correctly, and visually a bit like Zanzibar from Halo 2, except much better with waterfalls, streams and spectacular rocky verges and fur trees. For some reason, it seems to be the least frequently used stage when the game chooses match variables.

Bungie has shifted reloading to the bumpers, freeing the X button for the new tools that you find scattered around. The Bubble Shield does what you may expect it to, guarding you from incoming fire, though enemies can still freely walk in and out and get you from inside if they want. The purpose of the Bubble Shield is to think ahead, so if you have a weapon that needs charging you can guard yourself while luring someone in, before dishing out some laser pie. The Grav Lift is something you place down and when jumped over sends you flying into the air, helping to access high places. One of the Tips advised during the game's lobby waiting area is to throw a Grav Lift in front of a rapidly approaching vehicle and see what happens. There's also a new Tripmine tool that explodes if you touch it.

Meanwhile, replacing the portals found in previous Halo games, that served to instantly transport players from one part of a map to another, Bungie now has 'Man Cannons' - they're not literally cannons but more like Sonic the Hedgehog-style speed blasts that send you flying in the air to a far-away part of the map, and they're great fun to use, especially when you take aim and fire down to anyone in your sight below before landing.

Snowbound

Players are already getting creative and working out how to combine some of their old techniques from Halo 2 with the new tools available in Halo 3, and it could be fascinating to see how intermediate and expert players start to use these maps as their own sandbox for increasing levels of creative pwnage, as they impossibly fly across maps with bullets coming out of air, vehicles bouncing all over the place, and god knows what else.

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