Halo 3 multiplayer review

If you played a lot of Halo 2s multiplayer on XBOX Live Halo 3 will have a very familiar feeling to you. The controls are tight and responsive and it plays similarly to Halo 2 but it does seem to have more balance. Bungie believes that they have a good balance between weapons, melee and grenades and I tend to agree. One of the three is usually not good enough to take down an opponent but combine any two and you can dispatch your enemies quickly.

When I first played Halo2 the maps really left me kind of awe struck. I didn’t feel that way with the Halo 3 maps. The maps in Halo 3 in general are small. They are nice to look at but the only map that made me say “this map is awesome” is Last Resort, a remake of Zanzibar from Halo 2. There are only a couple of maps with a lot of wide open spaces. It seems that Bungie wanted to keep the battles in close quarters.

The matchmaking is set up much the same way as Halo 2 with an assortment of ranked and unranked play lists where the system picks a map and a game type and then fills the game full of bodies. It is a system that still works really well and is the best and fairest matchmaking service (for ranked games) in an XBOX Live title today. I still cannot believe that no other developer has tried to copy the system Bungie uses, but that’s a topic for another post.

For more multiplayer madness you can also play custom games where you pick the map and game and invite your on friends. If you don’t like the game types that ship with the game you can create and customize your own with a very powerful set of customization options that let you do a lot of different things in a custom game. If those options aren’t enough there is also the Forge. The Forge is a quasi map editor that lets you place, move or remove objects on each of the games multiplayer maps. This also creates a lot of customization options and allows you to completely change how a map plays.

Once you are done playing you can go into a lobby and view films of your recently played games. You can play them like a video tape slowing down the action to see just how that guy killed you in that game of slayer. You can take pictures and make small films out of the games as well. You can then upload these to Bungie.net or send them to friends.

With all of these options plus being able to play the campaign over XBOX Live, I would have to give the online portion of Halo 3 a 10 out of 10. They really nailed it. Not to mention all of the stats that are tracked at Bungie.net . My only complaints are that I wish there were a few more larger sized maps and that a few of the customization options from Halo 2 didn’t make it to Halo 3. That’s not enough to deduct any points.