The VISR seeks out hard edges and outlines them, increases your level of night vision and highlights enemies in red, making them much easier to spot. This will prove not only useful but necessary throughout the course of ODST, and anything that makes your life easier is welcome in this game. You certainly aren’t playing the Master Chief where you can soak up loads of damage, which brings me to my next point: health packs.
One of the bigger downsides to not being the Master Chief is that you don’t have the Master Chief’s amazing health regeneration. You remember how you’d have to find health packs in the original Halo? It’s back! While some people will absolutely loathe this, it didn’t bother me. It adds to the overall challenge of the game, which it needs because it’s roughly six hours long.
Single player campaigns seem to be getting shorter and shorter these days and though this may be heresy—it’s not always bad thing. While playing through ODST, you get a bit of everything that Halo has offered so far. For instance, there’s a warthog level, a scorpion level and a banshee level. These are all things that players love about the Halo single player or co-op experience – big set pieces to run around in and blow stuff up. It’s an absolute be a blast… at first. I’d rather have a shorter game than one where I’m simply redoing the same thing over and over again.
Regardless of the campaign length, the story feels disjointed by the constant jogging back and forth throughout the city looking for the next story piece. The Covenant troopers standing in your way become easier to just avoid in order to get to the next stage of the story. At one point, I noticed that I had a choice of checkpoints to interact with, so I went to the farthest one and played that segment of the story first. Well, in the part I chose, several things had happened to the squad in the chapter I skipped, effectively clueing me in to what was going to happen when I played it next. It's bizarre.
The writing and voice acting are top-notch. Nathan Fillion plays the role of Gunnery Sergeant Buck, and is accompanied by several other recognizable names including Adam Baldwin, Alan Tudyk and Tricia Helfer. All the back-and-forth between the troopers is pretty amusing and reminiscent of Firefly, seeing as how a large portion of the cast was also on that show. Production quality has never been a problem for Bungie and, as always, little touches are present to make it a thoroughly ‘Halo’ experience.
