Odious Tea
Continuing my perfect record of quitting Halo games largely because of some technical difficulty, I decided to give up on Halo: ODST.
If I were to sum up Halo: ODST in five words or less, I would say "It's Halo with atmosphere." In a break from Halo tradition, ODST takes place at night, on Earth, in a city that is largely indistinguishable from your generic sci-fi space station that is big enough to have roads.
The city of New Mombasa is virtually lifeless in both a literal and metaphorical sense. As you make your way from one side of the city to the other (over and over again, because each mission is located as far from the previous as possible), the only things you'll stumble across aside from samey sci-fi buildings and video game rubble are a few patrols of alien baddies wandering the deserted roads.
If this weren't a Halo game, you'd probably be able to pick the patrols off from within cover of the ubiquitous shadows before they or their buddies know what's going on. But that's not how Halo, rolls, son. The shadows (and silencer on your default weapon) are there for atmosphere only; You'll be plowing through these guys fast, hot, and circle-strafing.
Really, the only reasons these nighttime segments work are the excellent and moody soundtrack, and that they serve as a vehicle for the game's primary plot device: during these nighttime sections, you play as a single shock trooper who's been separated from his unit. Coming across various items (that ostensibly contain visual records) will trigger flashbacks to the events that occurred to the other members of your team during the preceding day. These segments are cut from much more traditional Halo cloth.
During these daytime missions you'll be driving vehicles and fighting alongside disposable soldiers, slaughtering aliens and wrecking their machinery. I'm not well versed in the Halo series, but it seems to me like more of the same. I'm not saying this is a terrible thing--the Halo series has certainly garnered share of fans--but I'm just not intrigued by the straight-up run-and-gun point-and-kill first-person-shooter experience anymore. I guess I got it all out of my system in the Quake/Unreal Tournament days, Lord knows I played them enough.
There's certainly a place for the simple shooter experience, and there are plenty of gamers out there who enjoy it. I guess I'm not one of them anymore. When I found out the hard way that the game does not autosave unless you actually exit to the main menu (good thing I happened to do it the first time, or I wouldn't have seen much at all), I couldn't bring myself to replay those couple hours I'd lost. Not because they contained a particularly harrowing section, but because without the promise of new content, similar as it might have been to what I'd previously played, I realized there was nothing there to engage me.
If I were to sum up Halo: ODST in five words or less, I would say "It's Halo with atmosphere." In a break from Halo tradition, ODST takes place at night, on Earth, in a city that is largely indistinguishable from your generic sci-fi space station that is big enough to have roads.
The city of New Mombasa is virtually lifeless in both a literal and metaphorical sense. As you make your way from one side of the city to the other (over and over again, because each mission is located as far from the previous as possible), the only things you'll stumble across aside from samey sci-fi buildings and video game rubble are a few patrols of alien baddies wandering the deserted roads.
If this weren't a Halo game, you'd probably be able to pick the patrols off from within cover of the ubiquitous shadows before they or their buddies know what's going on. But that's not how Halo, rolls, son. The shadows (and silencer on your default weapon) are there for atmosphere only; You'll be plowing through these guys fast, hot, and circle-strafing.
Really, the only reasons these nighttime segments work are the excellent and moody soundtrack, and that they serve as a vehicle for the game's primary plot device: during these nighttime sections, you play as a single shock trooper who's been separated from his unit. Coming across various items (that ostensibly contain visual records) will trigger flashbacks to the events that occurred to the other members of your team during the preceding day. These segments are cut from much more traditional Halo cloth.
During these daytime missions you'll be driving vehicles and fighting alongside disposable soldiers, slaughtering aliens and wrecking their machinery. I'm not well versed in the Halo series, but it seems to me like more of the same. I'm not saying this is a terrible thing--the Halo series has certainly garnered share of fans--but I'm just not intrigued by the straight-up run-and-gun point-and-kill first-person-shooter experience anymore. I guess I got it all out of my system in the Quake/Unreal Tournament days, Lord knows I played them enough.
There's certainly a place for the simple shooter experience, and there are plenty of gamers out there who enjoy it. I guess I'm not one of them anymore. When I found out the hard way that the game does not autosave unless you actually exit to the main menu (good thing I happened to do it the first time, or I wouldn't have seen much at all), I couldn't bring myself to replay those couple hours I'd lost. Not because they contained a particularly harrowing section, but because without the promise of new content, similar as it might have been to what I'd previously played, I realized there was nothing there to engage me.