I’ve decided to make a sort of ‘series’ of Halo 3 reviews. This time around, we have the campaign. I beat the campaign late last night. Wasn’t really trying to beat the game in 1 day or anything, I just did. I’m rounding my play time (by adding up all the film lengths) to about 8 and a half hours. Not too bad. I wasn’t rushing or anything. It’s a short campagn. I’m not going to lie about it. I also think that’s a good thing for a couple of reasons. Halo (for me) has never been ALL about the campaign. It’s a great multiplayer game. The campaign is almost just a bonus for me.

The main reason I’ll be playing the campaign a few more times is that there are a lot of reasons to play the campaign more than a couple of times, so keeping it short doesn’t overwhelm you when you think about how much work you have to do to beat it again. If you want all the achievements, your going to have to play the game at least 3 times all the way through. You get 125GP for beating it on normal, heroic and legendary. I beat it on normal in 8 and a half hours and just started it again on heroic. Heroic doesn’t fuck around. It’s tough. Much tougher than normal. So I can imagine each level increase as adding a couple extra hours of play.

On top of that, there are a few other bonus things if you want to get all the achievements and unlock everything in the game. Skulls (and I think terminals) are hidden throughout each level. If you want to actually spend the time searching each and ever nook and cranny of every level to find the skulls, have fun. They’re hidden pretty good. There are also plenty of guides out there already that tell you where abouts the skulls are. Each skull has a special ‘power’ that you can enable when playing the campaign to change it up. Things like disabling your radar, turning off auto-recharge on your shields, dropping less ammo, or having confetti pop out of brutes when you head-shot them. Most of the skulls increase the difficulty of the campaign in some way. One skull in each level is gold and also has an achievement attached to it.

I’m not going to talk about the story too much because I don’t want to spoil anything. Let’s just say that I felt like I was watching an incredibly long movie when playing. And on top of that, the campaign felt even shorter than it actually was. The battles are epic and large and the cut scenes are very well scripted. I heard some people weren’t happy with the ending but I thought it ended just fine and again reiterate that I play Halo for it’s multiplayer games, and not to be wowed by the plot twists or ending of the story. It was good.

The last, and best, part of the new campaign is the addition of co-op play mixed with their new point system. It’s recommended that you leave points off for the first time through the game so you get the story the way it was meant to be told the first time through. But after that, turn on points and see how you do. You get a certain amount of points for killing certain things depending on your difficulty level and what you killed. There are achievements attached to getting a certain score on certain levels. On top of that, you can play the campaign with a couple of friends and see who gets the best score on that level. This addition is what I think is going to take the campaign of Halo from just a ‘finish it once’ kind of game to a game that you play over and over again with your friends.

That’s about all for the campaign part of this review. Check back later for a new section when I play around with something else for a while. Not sure what my next review is going to be about just yet but I’ll start writing as soon as I figure it out.