Product Description

Halo 3: ODST for Xbox 360...Halo 3: ODST is a new game in the Halo saga that lets people experience events leading up to the epic story told in Halo 3 through the eyes of an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) as they search for clues leading to the whereabouts of their scattered squad and the motivations behind the Covenant's invasion of New Mombasa. The release adds a new dimension to an all-encompassing universe that gamers around the world have known and loved for close to eight years.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30 in Video Games
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: 5EA-00001
• Published on: 2009-09
• Released on: 2009-09-22
• ESRB Rating: Mature
• Platform: Xbox 360
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: .59" h x 5.40" w x 7.55" l, .47 pounds

Features

• Halo 3: ODST contains 1,750 new Xbox LIVE achievement points, as well as new weapons, technology and an invite to join the Halo: Reach beta in 2010.
• Stand-alone expansion to Halo 3 that doesn't require ownership of the previous game to play.
• New campaign, hero and tactics from the Halo universe as players take on the role of a rookie in the Orbital Drop Shock Troopers sent into New Mombasa.
• 4-player co-op "Firefight" mode offers a whole new way to play Halo with friends both via system link and over Xbox LIVE.
• Along with all the existing Halo 3 maps, ODST contains three new multiplayer Halo 3 maps: Heretic, Longshore, and Citadel.

Amazon.com Product Description

Developed exclusively for Xbox 360 by acclaimed developer Bungie, Halo 3: ODST is a new, stand-alone expansion to the Halo saga that lets players experience the events leading up to the epic story told in Halo 3 through the eyes of an entirely new character the ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper), as they search for clues leading to the whereabouts of their scattered squad and the motivations behind the Covenant's invasion of New Mombasa. The game adds a new dimension to an all-encompassing universe that gamers around the world have known and loved since the release of the first Halo game in late 2001. New hero, old enemy. View larger. Join the ODST. View larger. Stunning cinematics. View larger. New co-op multiplayer mode. View larger. New Campaign, New Hero, New Tactics Much more than an expansion, Halo 3: ODST allows players to explore dangerous new ground, search the dark, abandoned streets of New Mombasa for clues, and fight back against the Covenant invasion from multiple perspectives. Dropping in as "the rookie," a new member of an elite squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers (ODST) sent into New Mombasa on a classified recon mission, you'll be armed with specialized weaponry and upgraded technology, including silenced weapons and a VISR enhanced vision mode. Separated from your squad, you'll have to scour the city for clues in order to learn what happened to Buck, Dare, Dutch, Mickey, and Romeo. As you collect new clues, you’ll experience the story from their perspectives, fighting through the occupied city hours earlier. A New Way to Play: 4-Player Co-op Firefight Drop feet first into a new way to play Halo with the cooperative campaign mode, Firefight. Form a squad of your friends over System Link or Xbox LIVE and put your skills to the ultimate test against the invading Covenant war machine for glory, high scores, and achievements. Do battle in multiple environments, on foot or in vehicles, and against increasingly difficult waves of Covenant attackers while Halo 3's skull modifiers progressively activate to up the ante. After the Firefight, relive and review every last kill you earned and see how your high scores and stats stack up against your friends' and the community overall using Bungie.net's persistent online stats and Firefight leaderboards. 3 New Halo 3 Maps Three all-new maps make their debut for Halo 3's traditional, chart-topping multiplayer. Heretic, Longshore, and Citadel drop in alongside the original Halo 3 multiplayer maps, all packed in and playable from one standalone disc. Twenty-four maps in all, including the Heroic, Legendary, Cold Storage, and Mythic Map Packs, provide a peerless multiplayer experience, near limitless content creation and customization via the Forge and Sandbox, and a slew of new multiplayer achievements for Halo 3. New Challenges and Achievements For the first time, Recon Armor for use in Halo 3 multiplayer will be made available to players who complete the "Road to Recon" challenge. Earn all seven of the Vidmasters, a series of Xbox LIVE achievements that span Halo 3's Campaign and Multiplayer and Halo 3: ODST, and then visit your Bungie.net Service Record with a linked gamertag to enable your sweet new set of digital duds. If you already own Halo 3, you can get started now by collecting the "Annual" campaign achievement and the "7 on the 7th" and "Lightswitch" multiplayer achievements in matchmaking. And, if you've already downloaded the Mythic Map Pack, you can collect the hidden skulls on Assembly, Orbital, and Sandbox today. Community Features 4-Player co-op experience over Xbox LIVE or System Link, screenshots, saved films, custom Halo 3 multiplayer map and game variants via the Forge…all of the award-winning features included in Halo 3 are packed into Halo 3: ODST with an extra 1,750 available achievement points piled on for good measure. And Halo 3: ODST introduces an all-new single player experience with new characters, new weapons and technology, and the frenetic cooperative experience, Firefight, an entirely unique way to play Halo. Bungie.net Integration What good is winning if you can't brag about it to your friends? Extend your gaming experience beyond the console with Bungie.net's expansive integration. All of your lifetime stats are aggregated into your online Service Record - every last kill, every single medal, and your entire collection of career post game carnage reports, plus robust charts, graphs, and leaderboards allow you to instantly see how you stack up against the rest of your squad and the Halo 3: ODST community at large. Invitation to the Halo: Reach Beta As an added benefit of buying Halo 3: ODST players receive an invitation to participate in the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta due to hit Xbox LIVE in 2010. Halo: Reach is Microsoft Game Studios and Bungie's upcoming prequel to the events of the original Halo: Combat Evolved game. Based on Eric Nylund's novel "The Fall of Reach," it is packed with details surrounding the origins of the Sparten II soldiers, of which Master Chief was only one of many and the beginnings of the conflict with the Covenant and the Flood. If you want in, hold onto your copy of Halo 3: ODST and stay tuned to Bungie.net and Xbox.com for more details.

Customer Reviews

Too much for too little....
Its a decent game, but I feel as if I had played it three times before. Its mostly just more of the same with a few little bits of new thrown in. Couple weapons, Night Vision, firefight (but the fact you cant play with random people REALLY brings this game down.)
Not bad, but 60 bucks just isnt worth it. Im sorry I bought it. Just rent this game.

Good with some Eye Rolling Flaws
A side-story taking place in the Halo universe, "ODST" puts you in the role of the titular Orbital Drop Ship Trooper - a regular marine compared to the Master Chief, the series' normal protagonist. Using the basic gameplay and graphics of Halo 3, ODST is neat and different in some ways and disappointingly samey in others.

ODST follows a squad of drop troopers - primarily through the eyes of Rookie, a silent protagonist. Rookie proceeds through the abandoned, dead city of New Mombasa looking for records of his teammates, who he was separated from. Finding these records allows you to play a segment as another trooper - Buck, the leader, Mickey, the tech specialist, Dutch, the tough guy, or Romeo, the sniper.

Rookie's segments are really freeform and open - you explore the city, going through apartments and back alleys and occasionally running into random patrols of Covenant soldiers. The city's AI, the Supervisor, will occasionally try to get your attention by hijacking various city systems - signs will change to point you in the right direction, phones will start ringing, ticket machines will start spewing tickets, crosswalks and traffic lights will change, and so on. These directions will lead you to audio diaries - clues to a side-story - or weapon/ammo caches. All in all, it makes for a really great feel - almost to the level of Silent Hill - and it's backed up by some of the best music in the series.

The action stages are pretty good, too, but far more traditional. There is some openness in the levels, but for the most part they're similar to normal Halo 3. This is where the main promise of ODST - the fact that you're playing as a normal soldier - kind of falls flat. You can basically do everything that the Master Chief can do, including but not limited to flipping over cars and punching through tanks. Your health works slightly differently, but it still basically equates to "if you get hit, go duck behind cover until you recover". You can get away with running up to Brutes and punching them in the face until they die. All in all, you basically demonstrate the same level of "super-soldier" that the actual super soldiers have, as opposed to having to rely on your wits and your guns to overcome your weakness.

In addition to the campaign mode, ODST also offers a four-person co-op mode called "Firefight". In this mode, the human players attempt to hold out as long as they can against waves of Covenant troops. Like Gears of War 2's Horde mode, this can be a blast with the right people. To add a bit of difficulty into the mix, each wave of Covenant has a special effect attached to them - the ability to dodge grenades, or being more resistant to plasma, and so on. This ensures that the endless waves of Covenant continue to be challenging for as long as you play.

The graphics are similar to Halo 3's, but the urban environment is much more well-designed than those in Halo 3. A lot of care went into designing the city and the various signs and objects scattered around it, and the end result feels pretty natural. The sound is really good, too. The most obvious change, sound-wise, is that an injured ODST will pant and groan realistically instead of offering a single grunt like the Master Chief does. This makes it feel a lot more immersive, and is almost worth the fact that - for game reasons - you can heal up really easily and dying's not really that big of a deal.

On the whole, I understand why ODST didn't take a more realistic approach, but that doesn't mean it's not disappointing. As a game, ODST is good, but with some eye-rolling flaws that could've been turned into something more meaningful than "another Halo game".

8/10.

New Mombasa by starlight.
First off, that's pronounced Oh-Dee-Ess-Tee, fellow gamers. The game store clerks wish to punch you in the face when you attempt to say a game's acronym as an actual word. Trust me. Anyhow, "Halo 3: ODST" is a separate Haloverse story that strips itself of the series' iconic hero Master Chief. There are no super-powered Spartan cyborgs to pull humanity out of the fire in this one. Just you and your squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers standing between the hostile alien alliance known as The Covenant and the death of humanity. No pressure, though. The game was originally formulated as a mere add-on to Halo 3, but eventually grew to full-fledged game status. This has offended a lot of sniveling whiners who ran out and pre-ordered their copies based solely on the typical Halo hype and then sobbed themselves to sleep because they have no concept of story and ran through the game with 3 friends on Easy difficulty and found it too short on action for the money they spent. Real gamers will find that while the price tag may be a bit high if you already paid for all of the downloadable maps and don't gather your friends together regularly to partake in the phenomenally fun "Firefight" mode. But if you plan on enjoying this game to the fullest, you will not be disappointed.

As a single-player game, "ODST" runs a bit short and may be less bang for the buck then one might hope for. However, the manner in which the story is told is absolutely phenomenal. You begin your ill-fated mission hurling towards the Earth (which has just been invaded by Covenant forces) on a special-ops mission. But something goes wrong and your pods are separated and crash in different locations all over the Covenant-occupied African city of New Mombasa. You wake up as a trooper known only as as "the Rookie" many hours after hitting the ground in the dead of night. From there you search the city for clues about the whereabouts of your comrades. Each time you find a clue (such as a fractured helmet or bent sniper rifle) the game flashes back to a different member of the squad and you play out the scenario as that character and witness the events leading up to the object finding it's resting place where it will be discovered hours later by The Rookie. In addition, there is another side story littered throughout the city in the form of 30 audio files that chronicle the adventures of a young girl caught in the middle of the invasion. It's quite enthralling and I found myself looking forward to finding more pieces of that puzzle even more then the main story. "ODST" is a masterpiece of storytelling in that rite and it's why a lot of people won't enjoy it. They prefer to skip past the story segments and run around with their friends teabagging each other along the way. To really experience the game as it's meant to be played, you need to go it alone and absorb the atmosphere,loneliness and ambient noise of the ruined cityscape. Half of this game is enjoying the tension of relying on cover of darkness, using your excellent night-vision visor to it's utmost, hearing the amazing soundtrack, and exploring the city looking for audio files or finding the best ways to get the drop on roving patrols of enemies or the entrenched Covenant forces.

Same old Halo gameplay here. That is to say it's as good as first-person shooters get. But since you are not a Spartan, there are differences. First off, no shield. Your armor can take a few hits before your screen will turn red, indicating that you are fatigued and are taking damage to your health bar. To recover, you must stay out of combat for a time. It's not a lot different from past games, but you can't take quite as much punishment. You also no longer have gravity-defying jumps or one-hit kill melee capabilities, and no more dual-wielding. Don't go jumping off any cliffs either. Wipes your stamina right out. You also get one new Covenant race -whose mystery turns out to be central to the story-, a brand new weapon in the form of a silenced SMG which quickly became a favorite of mine, and the extremely welcome return of zoom capabilities on the pistol. I was hoping for more of a focus on stealth aspects, but Bungie couldn't help but make most of the levels typical shoot-em-ups. This definitely diminishes Master Chief's importance as I felt I kicked as much or more tail as an ODST compared to when I played the penultimate Spartan. But I sure as hell did have a great time doing it. There's also plenty of vehicular mayhem to enjoy. They could have easily recycled the epic score from previous games, but instead they crafted a new one that is as good as any they've done. And that says a lot considering every Halo score is among the greatest in gaming.

Okay, enough about single-player. Games like Gears of War 2 and Left 4 Dead gave us a new mode of gameplay where you are challenged to take on wave after wave of increasingly difficult enemy attacks and survive with a little help from your friends. Not to be outdone, Bungie has crafted their answer in Firefight mode, which can go on for hours at a time if you're good enough. If the campaign wasn't action-packed enough for you, get three buds together and get ready to be dropped in a very defensible position with a set number of lives (more can be gained) to endure endless waves of attack from every baddie in the game. Watch those snipers! The longer you survive, the more difficult the game makes it for you. It will start turning on "skulls" which make the game harder by decreasing ammo drops, empowering enemies, or otherwise making your life harder to keep. This mode is ODST's crown jewel, for sure. They've even added extra kinds of medals for you to earn based on your performance in battle. Firefight is unlimited fun and a FPS fan's co-op wet dream, plain and simple. If that still is not enough, the second disc of the set contains "the complete Halo 3 multi-player experience" which consists of every map ever made for the game and three brand new ones. 24 in all. That is a ton of maps and seeing as they run a few bucks apiece if you download them from Xbox Live that is a large value if you've been holding out. Even if you haven't bought Halo 3, you can join in the fun and madness of murdering complete strangers and then desecrating their corpse while they are forced to watch with all of the extra content using this bonus disc. If you are that guy, then this game is a steal. But I don't know that that guy exists.

Killer story: check. Awesome action: check. Multiplayer badness: check. New additions to the ever-growing Haloverse mythology: check. Incredible soundtrack: check. Yup; this is one fine game. Haters, keep on hating. Bungie gave the hardcore fans a treat with this. I'd have liked to see it priced about $20 cheaper, but I also want my very own Spartan armor and that ain't happening either. The fact is, I'm happy with this game in spite of it's brevity and the fact that I've already purchased most of the maps. If you've no interest in the story and mythology of Halo, I'd suggest you pass on this. The campaign is no challenge with 4 player co-op even on Legendary difficulty and there often are not enough enemies to go around so you will have to look for trouble to find it at times which will enrage many a fratboy. Firefight mode will still be a blast, but one can hardly be expected to shell out $60 for a single gameplay mode. And considering their is no matchmaking on that mode, you can only play it with people on your Friends List which is a pain. ODST isn't perfect, but it's obvious a whole lot of care went into it and it's a great experience all around. Plus, with a dream team cast featuring a Firefly reunion of Nathan Fillion, Alyn Tudyk, and Adam Baldwin plus Battlestar Galactica sex goddess Tricia Helfer and voiceover mainstay Nolan North -who has provided the voice for Deadpool and various other animated comic book characters- who the hell can really complain? It's more Halo, and that's never something to whine about.

4 1/2 stars, rounded up for a new wrinkle in the series.