Halo 3 -- Final Opinion.

I've played enough of Halo 3 to consider the fight finished. Halo 3 is not just more Halo, it's a lot more Halo. We might as well start with the story. Halo 2's now infamous ending caused vocal gamers on the Internet to scream en masse like idiots. They called it a non-ending and ranked it among the worst ever seen in gaming. It was the classic cliffhanger ending of the adventure serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It was well known that Halo 2 was the middle chapter of a trilogy at the time and they still went apeshit over it. I personally loved the ending to Halo 2 and it made me really want to play Halo 3 right then and there to find out what happened next. Halo 3 begins with Master Chief separating with the ship he had leapt to over Earth at the end of Halo 2 as it burns up from entering the atmosphere. With a little luck he survives the crash and is found by a group of soldiers on the way to engage the enemy and off you go. The game's story plays out to a satisfying conclusion. Along the way Cortana is saved and the Flood are dealt with and the conflict between humans and the Covenant is resolved. Most of the questions are answered and a few are brought up with the teasing of the planet Onyx at the end of the legendary difficulty ending. Nobody can accuse Bungie of not finishing this off this time around. The campaign is made more impressive by the fact that you can play the entire thing cooperatively with two to four players. And it performs admirably well, respawn choices aside. It's fun to boot. The campaign is furthered still by the meta-game that's enabled with the finding of the hidden skulls. In this mode you turn on a scoring system that rewards you with points for every kill you make. More points for headshots and grenade sticks than normal shots to the legs or arms for example. Reaching a set point value unlocks an achievement for the level. The more skulls you find, the more you can turn on, making it harder of course but also adding more point multipliers to the scoring system. Thereby making it more likely you'll reach the point total and unlock the achievement. And again, the meta-game campaign mode can be played in co-op. That's a lot of value squeezed out of the campaign mode. That's before you even get to Halo's bread and butter of online multiplayer. Where you'll likely to spend the bulk of your time fragging your friends and total strangers. And Halo 3 multiplayer is still love it or hate it Halo multiplayer. It's still wicked fun coupled with frustrations of a couple broken weapons. They've added new weapons and tools and vehicles to the Halo catalog. These weapons like the Gravity Hammer and tools like the Bubble Shield and vehicles like the Covenant Chopper have added a great amount of strategy to the multiplayer. More options, more potential, the tricker and craftier people become, the more fun the game becomes. On top of this you have Halo's insanely customizable multiplayer gameplay. There are tons of options for you to play with in creating new and interesting rounds of multiplayer mayhem. It goes further with Forge. Allowing you to distribute weapons and vehicles and alter their field positions and the like. And the icing on the Halo cake, the saved films. Allowing you to review any match from campaign to multiplayer. Being able to make movie clips and take screenshots and upload them in game and to bungie.net is just brilliant. It's one of those industry changing designs. The future. All of this is done with pretty graphics in campaign. Great voice acting and exceptional music. Tight, perfect, Halo control. We've spent a lot of time with Halo 3 and it's safe to say we got our money's worth. We've still got a lot of multiplayer left in us. I enjoyed Halo 3. In the end it satisfied and finished the fight well. I'm giving Halo 3 for the Xbox 360 a 9.5.