Campaign Impressions

I spent about 4 hours my Xbox 360 last night going through the Halo 3 campaign. I started the campaign on the Heroic difficulty setting. I played 2 hours of the campaign solo and the other 2 hours playing the campaign using the online cooperative feature of Halo 3. Through my first short period with the game, I have to say that Heroic difficulty provides plenty of challenge. The difficulty of enemies is no so much the issue, but instead the pressure lies in the need to be accurate with you shots. It is very easy to dig yourself into a hole by holding down the trigger of the assault rifle and just blasting away at grunts only to discover that you now have only one clip left, and huge group of enemies in front of you. This is consistent with both Halo CE and Halo 2, but is not an issue that I have run into so early in the prior installments.

This really forces the player to become adept at using all the weapons in the game, and is really one of the great features of the game. At one point I found myself dual wielding the plasma pistol and the regular pistol because I had no more ammo for the assault rifle. This need to constantly be switching weapons throughout the campaign in order to stay up on ammo is a great function that helps gamers of all levels be gradually introduced to the Halo learning curve, and it's by learning these skills through the solo campaign that really feeds the competitive nature of Halo's multiplayer.

I won't be able to play much of the campaign tonight, but I will play some more multiplayer and give some impressions tomorrow. I reached the rank of corporal last night, and there are still some playlists that I need to try.