Halo: ODST

Last night I beat Halo: ODST. I chose to quickly play this game after beating Darksiders, needing a bit of a break before taking on another long game. I'll talk about Darksiders more in length soon, as it had so many flaws that I was just plain agitated by the time I finished it. I needed to jump-start my will to play games again, and knew I'd get a solid experience from a Bungie game.

ODST (which stands for Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, the type of soldier you play as in the game) was pretty interesting and definitely better than I had anticipated. The story-telling aspect of it alone makes it stand out from the previous three games in the Halo franchise, and is definitely a must-play for anyone who is a fan of the series. I really loved the sections where you were playing as "Rookie", wandering the dark and Covenant infested streets of the recently attacked New Mombasa. The struggle for survival was conveyed perfectly by making the player choose his shots carefully, not wanting to waste the limited ammo supply available from enemy's weapons or to attract unnecessary attention.

These parts of the game were split up by action-packed segments consisting of the battle that had taken place earlier that day, from the points of view of the other members of the ODST unit. Here is where we got our classic Halo experience. Big weapons, big vehicles and big battles. For me, the formula never gets old. These sections were even more fun after spending a bit of time creeping from skirmish to skirmish in the dark.

The game also had a great achievement system. It had small 5 point achievements for doing special things while playing through levels. There was one for killing 5 people with sticky grenades in a single level and another for killing 10 people by killing them with the needler's overload function. It was great that every time I killed an enemy this way, it tracked my progress like an MMO tracks your progress through a quest. It also gave me a reason to try out all of the guns and multiple ways of killing people, altering my play style and keeping me from just abusing the best way to kill enemies. This is how achievements should be worked into a game.

Overall, I loved Halo: ODST, and it left me CRAVING Halo: Reach. I might have to go out and buy a copy of ODST to play Reach's multiplayer beta, which will be playable through ODST's multiplayer disk. If you're not so interested in the Reach beta, ODST still deserves a rent from Blockbuster.