Deja vu, now with added shaders!

Something about the original Halo thrilled me. It was in retrospect a sparsely populated, repetitively designed game world, but the mechanics of weapons management and seamless integration with a variety of different vehicles kept the pace from flagging too much, distracting the player from what was otherwise a fairly routine shooter. Oh, and the grenades were great fun, I'll give it that.

There was always a tentative suspicion that the limitations of hardware at the time were an agonisingly close barrier between Bungie and world domination, what with their game engine offering so much material ripe for massively multiplayer exploitation and potentially the finest, most playable simulation of future war. It seemed nirvana may only be one console itteration away...

Halo 2 stuck it's head above the parapets to mixed review, still residing on the original Xbox, and the die-hards kept the faith, promising that with more computing power would come something revolutionary. Even they had to acknowledge, however, that simply allowing your character to hold two guns at once was hardly a great advancement in game design. In fact, all things being equal it was actually quite a shitty stunt to pull. That and the fact that the fantastically disappointing open ending was not, as was claimed, a cliffhanger for the next installment, but rather an indication of the fact that imagination was in short supply at Bungie HQ.

So then, what of Halo 3, the game for which the term "fever pitch" was invented and perhaps the game most mentioned by mainstream media in the history of history? Even BBC News 24 rabbited on about the pre-launch hype and subsequent "fastes selling game ever" accolades. Well, it may have outstripped many big budget movies in terms of sales already, but it also disappoints in much the same way as the majority of those.

If your idea of value for money is to spend half a ton on Halo 2 running at 720p, so obviously using a hastily ported version of exactly the same game engine, albeit with nicer textures (which still disappoint in the context of the hardware), then knock yourself out. You even get a free remix of the ending from Halo thrown in for free. If Bungie's intention was to carry on exactly where installment two left off then they have done so to a much greater degree than anyone expected, chielfy by not changing a damn thing. Arbiter and Elites in alliance with humans? Check. Flood still running about exploding themselves in your face? Check. Same vehicles, only with one or two cynical new additions to try and pull the wool over our eyes? Check.

That's not to say this isn't a fun game, and anyone who is experiencing the Halo universe for the first time may well have a right old romp, even if you can play through it in about six hours if you're willing to skip the cutscenes (hey; you've seen them before anyway). It's just that anyone owning a previous title is going to find themselves holding two copies of essentially the same game, only one of them looks a bit shinier than the other. Thank god I played this on my mate Nathan's machine, because I'd be furious if I were the one parting with my hard earned dough.

I've already heard brainwashed idiots bleating "yeah, but it's just a precursor to Halo Wars", and to them I say this: are you happy spending fifty notes on a "precursor"? If you are then knock yourself out, but at least have the honesty to admit you've been conned. I almost died laughing when at one point in the game Cortana referred to a fallback plan of detonating the engines of a fleet ship as "not exactly an original idea". You don't know the half of it love. At the end of the day it just isn't good enough, and Bungie should be hanging their heads in shame. Thing is, they'll be too busy counting the money from all the hype they sold.