Another new feature is the Forge mode. A fully (up to eight people) mode that allows you to literally spawn items and change the location of objects and player spawn points. You are given a budget to play around with and once you have spent the budget you have to delete other items to get some money back. This mode's clever twist is that play can continue while editing progresses. There is nothing more satisfying than spawning a tank right above someone's head and letting it fall, but also you can get your revenge by shooting down the players that are in edit mode (they are represented by the Guilty Spark avatar). The things that you can accomplish in the Forge mode are almost limitless, you could create a big race course on Sandtrap, set up a recurring mess of exploding barrels or play baseball with a Brute hammer and a rocket launcher (a game where you don't get struck out, you just become a bloody mess on the floor if you miss). As with the main multiplayer mode, you can change many settings in Forge. You can change how much health everyone has, set up shields that are more powerful than regular ones, you could give everyone active camouflage that lasts forever or change the time it takes for players to re-spawn (among many other customisation options). You can literally mess about in Forge to your heart's content or you can save the mode and take it to play without people being able to edit items and settings. The only function not present in Forge is a terrain editor, a map's form is always kept at a constant.

The weapons and vehicles in 3 are mostly familiar, apart from a few changes to the arsenal and a couple of new vehicles to control. The Magnum makes a welcome return from Halo 1 and there is the introduction of the Spartan Laser Cannon; a very powerful weapon that has a charge up time before obliterating enemies and vehicles. Also new to the human arsenal is a flamethrower which, whilst looking nice, I found to be a bit useless. New Covenant weapons include the Spiker and the Brute Hammer, similar to the Energy Sword but just with a more explosive nature. The Needler in Halo 3 has been given a much needed boost in power which now makes it a very good weapon to use, and because of this increase in destructive force it is now no longer possible to duel wield when you have a Needler in hand. Another new addition to the player's arsenal that really changes the multiplayer quite a bit is the 'Equipment' that has been introduced. These pick-ups range from Bubble Shields to Shield Drainers and from Trip Mines to Shield Repleneshers. These items are great fun to use but as they are mapped to the 'X' button it took me a while to get used to them and I would often throw out a bubble shield when all I was trying to do was reload (the left and right bumpers control the reloading of each gun). A new vehicle for the humans is the two-seated Mongoose, a kind of quad bike hybrid that is great for Capture the Flag modes and nipping around the map quickly. Also introduced is the Hornet, a flying machine that has two seating positions on the outside for your squad mates to sit on. There are other new vehicles too like the Covenant Chopper and the Brute Prowler, but I will leave it up to you to discover the rest and find out what they can do.

Larger video: 1mb   HD

The real icing on the cake with Halo 3 (for me at least) is the Theatre mode and how it interacts with Bungie.net. When you have finished a game in Campaign, Forge or Multiplayer a file will be saved to your hard-drive that contains all the data pertaining to the game you just played. A list of recent matches you have played (about 20 in total) is listed in the Theatre menu and you can select from them and watch the match through again, in perfect detail. Cunningly, the camera isn't just stuck to your original PoV, in fact you can look from the eyes of anyone that played in the same game or you can have an outer-body experience by pressing the 'Y' button to get a floating camera that you can move anywhere you want to. You also have the ability to pause the game and take a screenshot that is then directly sent to Bungie.net so other people can look at them and download them to their or Mac. The picture at the top of this article was the co-op game I mentioned earlier that I played on release day with my buddies. The quality of the images is superb even though they are compressed into a jpeg format, the only downside to the images is the size (not in megabytes but in pixels) as they are a very hefty 1920x1080 pixels, and this does require that you have some kind of decent image software on your computer to down-size them for use in blogs and forums. Another feature of Bungie.net is the ability to browse through other peoples files and to set them to download to your the next time you load up Halo 3, just another way to kill time when you are at work then (not that I would condone browsing of Halo 3 files when you are at work, naturally). The site also lists all your past gaming exploits and gives you the same rundown stats that you get when you finish an online battle, you can even look over a series of pictures of the map which detail where all the frags occurred. It really is very extensive and full of features, some of which are more useful than others.

Bungie have generously given all Gold members of Live a 25MB or 6 slot (whichever comes first) file share area in the game that you can use to share your screenshots, Forge creations, videos and clips for other players to download and look at. You can't create clips from the campaign but you can from Forge and multiplayer, whilst you record the clip you can move the camera which will then replay exactly the same for the person that downloads it. So, no more 'I killed three dudes with one shot' banter anymore unless it really is true. I watched one video where someone got a headshot with the Sniper rifle only for the bullet to ricochet off the ground and into the head of another enemy. For 750 Points per year you can have the privilege of getting 25 slots or 250MB of storage to share content with people; a little steep in my opinion.

The achievements that can be earned in Halo 3 are plentiful, with a bunch of them being given to the player for completing levels in the campaign and a bunch of them being distributed by playing online in multiplayer games. There are also some achievements on offer to people that like to explore every nook and cranny of the levels by way of finding hidden skulls; one for the perfectionists really.

Some gamers have been complaining that Halo 3 really doesn't push the envelope in terms of graphical flair, however have said that they decided to go for a superior lighting engine to complement the graphics and allow the game to run at a steady 60 frames-per-second. Maybe some of the people complaining have recently played the superb BioShock, which in all fairness does look a whole lot better than Halo 3. That said, I feel that the look and feel of Halo 3 suits the game perfectly and I am happy with the direction that was taken with the game.

In conclusion, Halo 3 -whisper it - lives up to the hype and even manages to redeem the flaws of past releases. There are still some glaring omissions like the fact that there isn't a mode to enable bots for offline players wanting to play some of the online modes, and let's face it, not everybody has so leaving these people out in the cold is a bit unfair. My last point also brings up the question of whether or not the singleplayer experience holds its own for someone that doesn't have Xbox Live. Well the answer to that is a reassuring 'yes' or an affirming 'absolutely' if you know the back story. That said, while the singleplayer game has great length to it, for me it is still the multiplayer aspect that really makes this game a must own title.

While Halo 3 doesn't look as good as games like and it makes up for that with superb lighting effects, an engaging storyline and a multiplayer mode that will be played countless times over. If you were on the bench as to whether or not you were going to pick up this year's big release then I hope this review can go some way to telling you that you would indeed be missing out if you didn't get it. I still don't rate Halo 3's singleplayer experience as highly as perhaps 2's, but the deathmatch you get with Half-Life 2 isn't even a patch on Halo 3's. As a result of the combined singleplayer and multiplayer replay value I will be scoring appropriately. After all, it is like you are getting two groundbreaking games in one.

96%

By Thomas Ryan