I bought Halo3 last night and me and my friend beat it, and i have to say that the game is way to short and over rated.  I loved Halo, and Halo2 was great but still not as good as Halo1, but Halo3 is just a bad story.  It took us just over 5 hours to beat it on easy, and we were screwing around for the most part.  We will be beating it on the harder levels today but i would expect around the same time since now we know what to do for each level.  I'm a big Halo fan, read all the books and beat all the games now.

The graphics are great, after all i heard about the game i thought it was going to look bad, but just the opposite.  From the lighting to the textures the game is great to look at.  The one thing wrong with the game is the character models, they looked old and done years ago.  The game looks way better then CoD4 except for the character models. 

During the game you get massive frame slowdowns, it was under 5FPS at some points.  The game also warped one of us backwards a couple of times, which screwed us up due to all the different routes to take on some levels.  The levels are really big which was alot of fun after playing CoD4 in all the tight spaces.

We tried to do the theater and forge but they were taking forever to load, which seems very odd since i don't think it loads anything to the HDD.  After about 15 seconds they were still under 12% loaded. 

My friend tried one match online, but after playing RFoM and CoD4 online it was confusing to find a game, their was no gameslist that we saw and it matched us in a 4player match on the snow level where one guy left, not very fun.  Maybe you need to unlock different modes or something.

Overall the game was fun and no doubt i will play it for along time, but it just seems to be lacking.  From the reviews the game had received i was expecting the best game ever, but found a game that was worse then CoD4 and RFoM overall.

How did everyone else feel about the game? 

I played the game to with a friend and we really loved it. The big thing about Halo 3 is you've got never repetitive levels you will fight on 9 different maps. But if you play the game on normal / hardcore I would add 20% more time to beat the game on normal and 50% on hardcore. And I would say 12 - 13 hours on legendary. The strange thing is that I'm really sure I haven't got any frame drops. Really loved the game. One of the best cut-scenes was the one with the message from Cortana.

I played RFoM with a friend to and it's really a good game but I don't like Call of Duty 4 the only CoD I liked was CoD 2. 

The cutscens are very odd in this game, sometimes they look 100x better then others in the game, it was like they switched machines during production from xbox to 360. The levels were really great, never knew where i was going next. The slowdowns happened about 5 times that i can remember, most happened when we were fighting the flood. I also had the tank warp on top of the new UNSC plane thing, it was pretty funny. Still looking forward to playing halo4.

well done, already found the skulls?, use them that will spice things up a bit^^
online matchmaking is imo bit strange, a minor -

What I said in the game's comments on this site:

The singleplayer mode alternates pretty evenly between unbeliveably epic, attrociously horrible, and meh. Co-op makes it about a million times more fun, especially with 3 or 4 players online. Me and a friend of mine started playing it at 17.00 and were finished by 02.30 even thought we took an hour or so of breaks, so it's not very long either.

What the game really is about is the kickass multiplayer. I've only played it on 4 player splitscreen, but even that was so much fun I can't imagine what it would be like online. Especially for the Yanks, who appear to be required by law to demand online multiplayer in every game they play. =P

So yeah, I pretty much agree with you about the single-player mode, but multiplayer is supposed to be the point of the game. Wouldn't have minded if they had made the campaign a bit better, especially the part where you run around in the Flood's arse and try to find Cortana. Definitely way, way, way, way overhyped, but still an extremely enjoyable game.

Looks way better then CoD4? Wait.. what?

imo it does ( just the feeling )

You have to play shooters on at least medium if you want anything more than 5 hours. Call of duty 4 was about the same length as halo 3 maybe shorter and that was on medium. Play COD 4 or Halo 3 on hard or more and it becomes a nice 8-10 hour game as you get more of a challenge. Not sure how you where confused by multi player as cod uses a very similar lobby system. Not sure if you will play it for a long time as cod4 if you have it has a better multi player. Halo 3 was a great game for me for about 2 weeks until cod 4 came out. My friends and I played it to death during those two weeks beating over xbox live on legendary and getting all the skulls. Was really a lot of fun but they ALL picked up cod4 and just won't stop playing the multi player.

yes halo 3 is very short,me and my cuz beat it in 6-7 hours but the story was great,and i love the online,the some skulls also make it intersting,the cortana level is proably the hardest which i can never win in legendary

the game took from me and my freind 8 hours on easy !
but I stell play it and I will play it for Halo 4 or the new XBOX
because of the live ..