So after getting teased with a demo of Halo 3: ODST a few weeks ago, I finally got to sit down with both the campaign and the new firefight mode for about an hour. I have to stay tight-lipped about some of the story elements I was shown in the campaign, but there are some details I can share. Since watching someone play the game, and actually playing it are quite different, I noticed some things I hadn?t before. Previously I was worried that the viewpoint from an ODST helmet hadn?t been corrected from the seven foot tall view we were used to, but after seeing a Hunter up close and personal, it?s clear that your new protagonist is a little shorter. I was also happy to discover that the suppressed SMG can fire in zoomed mode. The ODST player character still seems to be very overpowered, but I?m going to forgive Bungie for that because I?m actually less concerned with the campaign mode. It looks fantastic of course, but after my hands-on time with firefight, it?s clear that?s how I?ll be spending most of my time with ODST.
Firefight 1:
Three of us hopped into the first game with the difficulty set to Heroic in a day-time New Mombassa city map. We were positioned up on a mezzanine which gave us the height advantage on incoming enemies that had to scale that the stairs to get to us. That was until jackals started sniping us from across the map, which was soon followed by rocket-pack Brutes, and soon after by active camo Brutes. Each wave dropped increasingly difficult enemies on us ending with Brute Chieftains carrying hammers. Luckily one of my squad mates dropped one of them early and so I was able to pick up a hammer and start wrecking the incoming Brutes. Shortly thereafter I heard ?last man standing? and I got a little frantic trying to both take cover from the snipers while preventing myself from being cornered by incoming Chieftains. I ran for a better position, but came face to face with a Chieftain, both of us wielding hammers. I struck first, but he just survived it and immediately activated his armor. My second strike didn?t have any effect, but his sent me flying quite a distance. Game over.
Firefight 2:
This time we got to try one of the new maps we hadn?t seen yet. This was a large outdoor map with some vehicles to play with. Imagine a small chunk of the Tsavo Highway level from Halo 3 with a large defensible structure in the center. Downstairs is a garage which houses a Warthog that will respawn each round. I love driving these things around so I immediately went for the driver?s seat while one of my squad mates hopped in the gunner seat. What followed was a scene of utter carnage that lasted into the final wave of the first round. The jackals started getting smart about shutting down our Warthog with their charged shots and I think it was a fuel rod grunt that finished the job. So we were left to finish off wave 5 of the first round dodging Brute choppers on foot and trying to hunt down and kill active camo Brutes and Chieftains. We did pretty well and moved on to round 2.
I asked our Bungie rep about the difficulty curve and he explained that wave 1 of round 2 wouldn?t really drop more or harder enemies on us, but that the addition of a new skull (difficulty modifier from Halo 3) would make things harder. I thought we would just clean up again with the Warthog, but since the new skull was the one which makes every enemy a grenade chucking maniac, we had two plasma grenades stuck to our vehicle almost immediately.
Okay, so now we?re all on foot frantically trying to regroup and just as a Brute Chopper was about to run me over I discovered that you can indeed jack covenant vehicles as an ODST. I had been told we couldn?t jack the wraiths, and so I had just assumed that a lowly ODST wouldn?t be able to simply knock a gigantic Brute off his chopper and be able to figure out how to pilot it, but I was wrong and it saved our team one of our pooled lives. But of course this stolen Chopper didn?t last long as I quickly had to hop off because a grunt had tossed a flame grenade onto it. Soon thereafter in what couldn?t have been much further than wave 3 I got the ?last man standing? announcement again. There was a Wraith in one corner of the map, a bunch of sniper jackals about 100 feet away from me and who knows what else hiding on the other side of the map. But I knew that if I made it, my roommates would get reinforcements and respawn. All I had was a Brute shotgun and something with an empty clip. I figured my best chance was to head for the nest of jackals and take them out and hope the wraith didn?t mortar the hell out of me while doing so. I grabbed a carbine off a covenant corpse and ran into the jackals strafing back and forth and trying to cover myself with the carbine. Once I got in close enough I pulled out the shotgun and started offing jackals, I started getting excited thinking about how I would take down the wraith once I was done with these guys, when I just got nailed with a headshot from behind by another one of the jackals. Game over, I failed to bring back my teammates again.
I had some idea that I would like firefight. I love cooperative games, and you can only play so much coop campaign, but I didn?t realize how fun this could get with the right maps. The stuff I saw from E3 looked nice, but it wasn?t until we were cruising around in a Warthog that I got a deep sense of satisfaction from firefight. I?m really excited to see what some of the other maps we haven?t seen will bring to the experience.
