Played this game for the first time late last year while I was on a big halo kick. The atmosphere of this game is really unique and I think it definitely paved the way for some of the moodier themes / atmosphere in reach, although this game doesn’t quite take it as far as reach does in some regards. While ODST’s are still incredibly strong compared your average UNSC solder, it is nice to experience the Halo universe from the perspective of someone who is a bit less OP than a Spartan. The characters are great in this game and easily one of the most memorable aspects of the narrative. They feel very human as far as video game characters come, and have a lot of heart.

The gameplay is pretty much just the halo gameplay you are used to. Many of the louder sections of gameplay feel a bit out of place alongside a story that is more shrouded in a balance of hope and hopelessness.

What really makes this game worth playing is the piano. I was shocked to find such a uniquely beautiful soundtrack in a game about rough and tumble space troopers who fly at breakneck speeds towards impending death and destruction. If you go to any of the 8 hours ODST ost/ambiance videos on YouTube and read the comments… it genuinely might bring you to tears. There are hundreds of stories of hardship, grief, and loss. Everyone in the comments is so encouraging of one another, there is a true sense of camaraderie, and it’s honestly one of the most honest and uplifting environments I have ever encountered on the internet, it’s really worth seeing for your self. I guess the themes of resilience, hopelessness and hope, perseverance, and even love really resonated with many players.

Gameplay is whatever but the heart is really there. I want to say I hope halo will revisit this sort of atmosphere and storytelling one day, but maybe there isn’t really a need, because this game still exists, and it’s great

7/10

i think if i had played this game on launch i would be pissed

but as a dlc for the MCC?

man it's great i love mombasa and i finished a month ago and still hear the entire OST

It's more Halo 3 so whats not to love

although a not clear indicator of how much stamina you have killed me a couple times

I was so on board with the game in the first few hours, where roaming the city at night all by yourself finding out what happened to your team was absolute vibes. But it kinda quickly loses its luster as you find out that after a while, the city you explore doesn't have that much to offer. Everything kinda looks the same and the map turns out to be a lot smaller than you initially thought. The one upside to exploring the city is finding the audio logs. I did enjoy trying to find them and learning about its story, but after a while I just couldn't find anymore without having to resort to backtracking a huge part of the city which I didn't have the patience for, leaving the audio log story line to be unfinished and kinda left me blue balled.

None of the flashback missions were bad, but I also didn't find many of them to be that interesting or stand out. There was no mission in the game that was unique to this game that the previous games haven't already done. The setting gets very tiring to look at as 95% of the time you are just looking at city. I also wasn't really attached to any of the characters as you don't really spend much time with them or see them interact with each other that much. Also who's idea was it to make the final mission an escort mission.

Epilogue cutscene goes hard though.

Man, I feel so dumb for progressing one third of the game and only then realising that there was a night vision option in the game and I had to turn it on to see things clearly instead of roaming around like a blind bat for 33% of the game. There were some really dark rooms where I had to navigate and was clueless for the majority of the time. I like the atmosphere of the game, it's kind of different from the other halo games but sometimes it looks unpolished and the cutscenes were pretty bad in comparison to the rest of the franchise, the face models looked like they were made in early 2000s , one of the main characters almost looks like Claude from gta 3, it was that block shaped and the animations in the cutscenes didn't help much either. I guess this was made on a lower budget compared to the other halo titles. I wasn't that invested in the story too and the humor that they went for felt like a misfire imo. They tried to replicate the kind of humor Battlefield Bad Company 2 had (I know BF released later) but then the latter did it far better than ODST. The gameplay and level design was fun albeit short but there were a few repetitive segments in the pseudo open world where you have to keep finding clues to something, that really felt boring honestly. Overall I don't mind this game that much it was decent, I appreciate that it was shorter on length and distinguishes itself in certain aspects from the rest of Halo. And before I finish ranting I literally was not able to find a single health pack in this game, so playing it on heroic that low health indicator sound was ringing in my ears like a siren throughout the game.

Halo 3: ODST is a side game of the Halo series, taking place during the events of Halo 2.
Due to its nature as a side game, its campaign doesn't take as long as the other games, being even shorter than Halo 3's. I personally didn't mind it, because it really is supposed to be a small little game that expands a bit more on Halo's lore.

For the first time ever in the series, you don't play as Master Chieft, but rather you are constantly switching control between members of ODST (that's "Orbital Drop Shock Troopers" for short). They don't feel as nimble as Master Chief was, which makes sense considering they're weaker. Although not having the ability to dual-wield made me a little sad.

The main plot of the game pretty much revolves around the Rookie searching for the others members of ODST in the streets of Mombasa. While searching for them, you'll progress in a sandbox area which... admittedly was the worst part of the game. It wasn't that interesting to travel and really only served for me to get to another one of the areas I needed to inspect to continue the plot.
But after you inspect certain areas, you got to a level similar to the ones in Halo 3, and they're pretty good! There was some good variety throughout the levels, and things felt just like previous games.

It's in those levels that you'll learn more about the other members of ODST and I found their interactions to be pretty solid. Nothing that really stuck out in my head though, but I appreciate the attempt at bringing other protagonists to the Halo universe.

The soundtrack was one that I really enjoyed. Not every song was super memorable to me, but the piano theme that played after you inspected one of the areas, and some of the more atmospheric pieces that appeared in certain missions were definitely really well made!

While the graphics and overall presentation isn't that different from Halo 3, I do like that they emphasized facial expressions this time around. They're not too incredible, especially by today's standards, but I do like they did them.

Overall, Halo 3: ODST is a nice little side game to the Halo series that while it doesn't really do anything spectacular, is still a nice adventure to go through.

Replayed this one with a buddy experiencing this for the first time, and he told me ODST was a phenomenal game until the last hour and I honestly agreed. Even on my first playthrough I thought the ending was abrupt and lacked impact, and Costal Highway is really not that good of a final mission. Doesn't help that MCC is completely missing the credits after campaigns, making this issue even worse when we were just immediately sent back to the main menu after the ending cutscene.

Despite that everything that comes before is incredible. Finding the clues of your lost squad members and seeing how they tie into the mission that you play as each of them is such a creative way to tell the story of this game. Although, it felt like the health system in this game, which I imagine the intention was to make the player feel weaker because you're not a spartan, actually felt like you could tank more hits before dying as Chief. Though perhaps it was because I was playing co-op. Or cuz I'm just too good at quickscoping covenant scrubs. #Pwned

Mild spoiler warning (of a specific level), but it's at the end, so proceed with minor caution.

This game was great. I have no idea how long I spent on it, but I loved it. Second favorite Halo game behind 2.

This game is a mystery story. I'm not sure I got that when I first started playing it; in fact, when I first started out, I'm not sure I got the premise at all! But in the past week, it dawned on me what exactly was going on, and it sold me immediately. The characters are fantastic, the story is interesting (especially Sadie's, which I don't think I've finished!), and the gameplay is intelligent and frantic, just like a Halo game should be. I forgot how much strategy goes into playing these games, and it really forces you to slow down and think about your next action (which gets increasingly harder to do after dying so many times!)

I was so relieved to find out I didn't have to face the Flood in this game. As badass as the ODSTs are, I'm not sure they would have survived! Speaking of which, this game does a fantastic job at making you feel vulnerable, something that was pointed out to me when I read the Wikipedia article on it. I was like "oh yeah," lol. But even so, I definitely felt a lot more vulnerable, and had to occasionally take moves incredibly carefully and specifically in order to break the death/checkpoint-load cycles I got myself trapped in occasionally (or frequently).

Favorite level was Buck and the team going to capture a Phantom. Loved that one.