The Official Metroid Prime 3 Reviews Thread

[ItsaMii]

CADMBFan said:

famousringo said:

Okay, since there are a few people uner the delusion that Halo had a good campaign, I'm going to tell you all the things that sucked about it. The gameplay was okay, and I did finish it more than once (sometimes I'm in the mood for mindless alien fragging), so I do have some idea of what I'm evaluating. I haven't played Halo 2, so I'm only commenting on the original.

 

1. Zero Bosses in the Entire Game: Not a single one. There are some tough enemies, and tough rooms, but not a single battle which felt epic. The only thing close to a boss fight is the escape at the end. This makes the gameplay feel very tedious, when all you're doing is killing the same trash you've killed a hundred times before. You just fight a little more cautiously when they use trash that's a little harder. You don't need to learn any specialized tactics after you learn when best to throw grenades and duck behind cover.

 

2. Story, or Lack Thereof: There are about four characters in the entire game, unless you count Foehammer who doesn't have a face. Of those four, only 343 Guilty Spark has any history whatsoever. Only the non-humans have any personality (ironic, isn't it?), and there is no character development in anybody. There's a skeleton of a plotline, which is mostly just used to describe mission objectives.

 

3. Linear Gameplay: Like most modern shooters, in order to ensure that the player doesn't have to worry about anything other than aiming his next shot, Halo is an extremely linear game. Personally, I don't enjoy being herded like a sheep, and this game feels like one big corral. There's one mission when you first land on Halo that lets you pick which of three objectives you go to first, and there are a couple times when you have to retrace your steps, but the latter feels more like lazy level design, which brings me to my next point.

 

4. Terrible Level Design: You're on a Covenant battle cruiser. Will the room behind the door be a big hanger, or just more corridors with dead doors? How exciting! Or maybe you're in the featureless guts of Halo itself, killing dozens of flood until you lose track of which way is forward and which way is back. Not all the levels are this bad, but the bad ones are soooooo looooooong.

 

Conclusion: Don't delude youself into thinking Halo's contribution to gaming was its campaign. Halo's contribution was very good (for the time) FPS controls on a console, coupled with excellent multiplayer. The alien-blasting gameplay was solid, and cool vehicles broke up some of the monotony of killing another room full of flood or another twitchy Covenant Elite. If the game had been single-player campaign only, it probably would have been worth 8/10.

Brilliant analysis...sums up my thoughts exactly. I'd also add the lack of variety...the game essentially boils down to run, shoot, run some more, shoot some more...I always felt like I was just running from point A to point B and shooting every enemy in sight without any other more complex objectives to break up the action. Halo is the epitome of mindless run-and-gun for me.

 Great. Now I do not need to make a 3 page report telling people why I think Halo single player is so boring and repetive.  I would add some more points.

5) One of the Worst weapons in any FPS. 8 weapons for a FPS may be strange, but 8 weapons when you can only carry 2 at a time and they do not work how they should is ridiculous. You can carry a rifle with 600 rounds and a rocket launcher with 10 rockets but you can only carry a plastic pitol and pistol with 100 bullets. The machine/rifle is the worst weapon in the game and sadly the one that you never run out of ammo or have trouble finding. The damage is worse than the Klobb for Gondeneye and the accuraccy is similar to the Reaper in PD. The pistol is great, but does not work in a logic way. It is one of the strongest gun, quicly, accurate (zoom function) but lacks ammo and is a little hard to find. Shotgun comes really late in the game and does not work on aqnything save for flood. Sniper is strange like the pistol, small clip capacity, hard to find and scarce ammo. The worst is that you use it on 2 or 3 levels and the flood is kinda immune to it. Rocket Launcher is another broken weapon, the rockets are so slow that you can not even one hit kill an elite with it (he dodges and minimizes damage). Alien weapons are almost all crap. They are everywhere, but you can not even reload. Needler is too slow and innacurate. The plasma rifle overheats faster than the pistol (I can fire more shots per second with pistol), is harder to find and lacks a charged shot. Summing up. 8 weapons, 2 broken (needler, rifle), 2 that are not useful enough (rocket launcher and plasma rifle), 2 that are rare or you only get late in the game (shotgun and sniper) and 2 that are damn useful but lack ammo or big clips (pistol and plasma pistol).

6) The 3 last levels are earlier levels backwards and not any 3 levels, the most unispiring and repetive levels. They could make it worse by adding the Library. It is basically corridor, hall, open area and repeat.

7) 4 kind of enemies for almost the whole game. People may love Halo, but most of its gameplay is killing the same 4 types of covenant. 60% grunt, 20% elite, 15% Jackal and 5% Hunter. There is the flood, but consider that most of them are just elite grunt in rotten state. There is also the bug like flood, but they are not really a challenge even on legendary.

8) Frustating gameplay. Sometimes a elite attacks you with a ship and you must kill him to proceed. The problem is that you only have pistol and plasma pistol. Plasma and rockets are too slow and the ship dodges most of its shots and pistol is not strong enough. After 40 shots the ship explodes and run over you killing you. Elites on the last level go grenade frenzy on you and unless you are hiding behind a wall they hit you 100% of the time. Level 3 ship boarding (with the sword elites) is so unbalanced that you may need to restart the level to get sniper ammo.The lack of weapons and weapons choices forces you to kill 20-30 enemies with a really weak gun. It still does not make sense to me that the pistol is good for long range and the sniper rifle is great for close range combat like in level 3.