Halo 3: ODST Campaign review.

Earlier I reviewed Halo 3: ODST based on the bit of campaign I played and the hours of firefight mode I played. Now that I have beaten the game, a full review can be done. In the link below you can read about the firefight mode and all of it's glory.
http://sharpiegamer.blogspot.com/2009/10/halo-3-odst.html

The campaign is a fun experience that you may or may not want to do over again. In the campaign you play Rookie; you and your crew get knocked off course on your decent onto a covenant ship when they go into slip space. You wake up several hours after your crash landing onto New Mombasa, left alone in a dark hostile place crawling with covenant troops. Your goal is to figure out where you team is, or what happened to them. Early on in the game, you meet the Superintendent, a massive super computer that basically runs the city. From the Superintendant you can view objectives and places you need to go, there are 6 areas you need to investigate to discover what happened to your team. This is where the fun really happens, when you find the right object using the detective visor it brings you into a flashback on what happened to your team. These flashbacks are alot more action oriented and brings you back into the normal Halo "shoot everyone in sight" scene.

Despite being able to go to these way points in any order you want, it really helps when you do it in the right order. I managed to almost go through the flashbacks in chronological order, but if you find that you've done it in a jumbled manner and you care about the story, you will have to piece all of the events together for it to really make sense.
Another problem in being able to do these flashbacks in any given order is the pacing. When played through in chronological order, each level is more intense than the other. Like, the very first one, you are simply on ground, moving through the city fighting some brutes and the like. Later, you go onto fight hunters, but then you are high jacking a phantom ship. It's weird when you playing the most epic scene in the game, and then for the rest of the game, it just doesn't compare to what you first played.
Despite this, there will always be the same ending and this ending remains intense and challenging.

With all of the flashback levels aside, getting to them isn't all that great. You are playing as the rookie and you travel across New Mombasa in the dark, so you will be using your detective visor just to see where you are going most of the time. This takes away from the dark lonely atmosphere of the game if you'll end up playing 4/5 of the game using that visor. While traveling through the city, you will come across the occasional troop of enemies patrolling the city, but otherwise it is a long walk trying to find your way to the next way point, it seems a little bit too long too. Despite this, the background music gives you a feeling of loneliness. If you really care to look for it, there are sound records of a girl and her tale of the covenant invasion called Sadie's Tale. I personally was not too interested in this, but anyone who is interested is given a little motivation to explore the streets of New Mombasa.

So looking back at old scores. Here is the final score for Halo 3 ODST

Gameplay: 9
Gameplay, difficulty and level design remain solid and is over all fun to play, especially firefight mode.

Presentation: 8
Being too dark for its own good, just about forcing you to play through the game with the detective visor on, save for the flashback levels. Flashback levels are really where the setting is good with a fairly diverse landscape.

Story: 6
An over all bucket of dece of a story, but who's really playing a Halo game for the story?

Lasting Appeal: 10
Firefight will leave you and your friends with lots of fun to be had looooong after the campaign in complete. With ridiculous pars as 200,000 points, you'll have fun reaching the par score and getting better.

Over All: 8/10 (24/30)
Still, a bit too pricey for a game that should only be costing $30 or $40, you'll still have a ton of fun with firefight and a good run with the campaign. It's a great game, but the only real question stopping you from actually getting the game in my opinion is the price.