Halo 3 (Limited Edition)

The Good
Halo 3 has an awesome story that got me interested in the franchise as a whole, normally I would beat on the fact that the game assumes you have played the rest of the franchise, but this time it didn't really annoy me. Even without knowing what the entire story is about, I really enjoyed the story of Halo 3 that was very epic. I especially liked the desperate atmosphere of this game, humanity knows it is nearing extinction and that you are their only hope. That is the kind of atmosphere I miss in a lot of other game, including the "Legend of Zelda" franchise where most characters act very strange considering the situation they are in.

The controls are very easy to understand for people who have played an FPS before and they didn't there is a short tutorial to help them.The Spartans are supposed to be able to pick up any weapon and use it, the game makes the most of this by throwing random weapons all over the place and not giving the player skills he has to train (like the Call of Duty multi-player). I also want to mention the vehicles which also take only a few seconds to understand, but can become very deathly weapons when you learn how to master them. That is the entire gameplay of this game in a nutshell: Easy to learn and rewarding to master.

The music is pretty nice and dramatic which sticks to the desperate mood of this game. I really liked the choirs on the title menu, but I also loved the fast and exciting music during the big battles. The music doesn't get into the way when playing multi-player either, which is always a big plus for me because distracting music can lead to some very annoying mistakes (not hearing where the bullets are coming from for example).I replayed this game so many times and yet it never ceases to amaze me.

The "forge mode" is a pretty sweet feature that can lead to some very cool results. I have wasted so many hours and so many space on my hard-drive just making maps with my friends and family to play in, I still got the best of them on my hard-drive, but most crappy ones have been removed. The rest of the multi-player is also pretty awesome and I am a big fan of the vehicles. It only gets better when you go online in games with sixteen people or something, complete awesome chaos.

The Bad
This version is horrible!, it's so horrible that the words to describe it still need to be invented. First of all: it's just the game with a bonus-CD and an art-book in a metal cover with no decoration whatsoever. Second: Those things that have to hold the CD in place always drop it when you are not using it (thus causing a lot of scratches) and won't let it go whenever you want to play the game (so you have to pull it out with force). I had to buy the "Halo 3 + Fable II" copy of this game because the game-disc literally broke. There are small pieces missing and there is no way to fix it, 60 dollars down the sink.

While forge-mode is entertaining there are some very odd restrictions they force upon you. There is a budget for one thing and a limit to how many of a certain kind of item you can spawn (like thirty fusion-coils or twenty battle-rifles). This is pretty annoying because we often felt like we needed more to create a cool map. A second problem is that you have to manually turn items around, so if you have to place something very precisely it can take hours before you got it right.

The community is just a big pile of internet-trolls and other annoying people who roam the internet. I have never seen a single game where there isn't a team-killer, 8-year old or other type of griever walking around and ruining the game. Bungie has never done anything to get rid of these people and filing complaints for Microsoft to look into has as much effect as asking trolls to stop yourself. I have left Halo behind me because I was done with the story and the multi-player, aside from playing with my family, was a disaster.

On the hardest difficulty the story-mode only lasted me six hours last time I played it, but that seems to be the standard for shooting games nowadays. Many people say that the multi-player makes up for that, but many people are part of the "8-year old whiner" club that takes up 90% of this game's fans. I have replayed the game quite a lot of time and playing a game with family never gets old, but it's still very short and easy with only a few moments scattered scarcely around the story that are moments where I got stuck.

The Bottom Line
Halo 3 is actually a pretty good game, it sure isn't worth all the praise it has received from the Press and players, but it isn't the worst game out there either. It's certainly my favorite FPS on the xbox 360 (counting Borderlands as an RPG only) and it's far better than Call of Duty and Medal of Honor. There are some pretty big flaws, the biggest on been the community that surrounds this game and the second-biggest been the lack of advanced tools in the forge-mode, but it's a gem nonetheless.

Why still the low score? Because this edition is the most retarded creation ever. I can almost guarantee you that the game won't last more than a year at best, but it is also pretty boring. My Fable 3 special edition came with a lot of small and detailed extras and was made to resemble a giant book, but this is just the same game in a black box made of metal, the only extra is a bonus-CD and a book filled with pointless artwork.