I beat it last night, with the help of a good friend. The burning question: how awesome is it? Well, I’m starting to hallucinate from lack of sleep and my hands are cramped worse than arthritic old lady’s. That should answer your question. The short review:

This is definitely a game worthy of the Halo franchise, and it isn’t just a reskinned version of Halo 3. The original trilogy was the story of a supersoldier; a hero and a savior. He fights in larger-than-life, mythical settings, and he plays to win. Master Chief saves humanity, but he is not of humanity. This is an all-too-human tale, taking place after the Covenant invade Earth. A team of ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, meaning elite space paratroopers) attempts to land on a Covenant ship hovering above Africa, but a terrible explosion makes them miss their mark and they land in the abandoned and mostly destroyed city of New Mombasa. (Props to Bungie for not falling prey to the oh-so-boring convention of setting a tale of massive urban destruction in New York.) The team is scattered, beat up, and helpless, and the scenery is not a breathtakingly beautiful artificial ring world, but a messy, smashed up urban environment. This is not a tale of victory. The entire plot is one long, slow retreat. It’s Bungie’s take on Black Hawk Down.

If there’s one thing that hampers me when playing Halo, it’s that I’m a little bit of a Leeroy Jenkins. I just kind of run in and shoot until I’m out of bullets and then hope I can melee everything to death before I get killed. I can tell that ODST will really only be conducive to this approach as long as I’m playing on Easy. There is not a lot of spare ammo laying around, and there are a couple of levels that are deliberately sparse of extra weapons to pick up, so using ammo wisely and saving the big guns for the Big Bads is important. Next time I play the game through, I want to see if I can cultivate enough self-discipline to play the whole thing with an emphasis on stealth.

Bungie’s legendary attention to detail The HUD is lurrrrrvely, with really helpful outline effects for night vision. The music effectively supports the gameplay, but there are no brilliant themes that I will listen to over and over again. ¿Qué pasa, Marty and Mike?

The voicework is radtacular, with part of the Firefly cast providing characters we can love. Captain Malcom Reynolds (pre-Battle of Serenity Valley) plays the part of Gunnery Sargent Buck, Jayne steps in as big gun man Dutch, and Wash plays zen master pilot Mickey. Number Six from that show I don’t watch is apparently the voice of a blonde chick that Buck used to date and still carries a torch for.

Which brings me to the only way I’m really going to be a griefer on ODST. How was this story penned by the same Joe Staten that gave us the Knight-and-Lady tale in Halo 3? ODST suffered from a lack of relevant female characters, largely because its goal to include feminist themes was transparently insincere. A note, Bungie: don’t bother if you’re not going to do it right. I’m fine with a story by, for, and about men. I’m not okay with pseudofeminist elements because marketing said it was a good idea.

We’re introduced at the beginning of the story to Dare, an ONI officer who’s called on her ex-boyfriend Buck after mysteriously walking out on him and breaking his heart a while ago. She lied to him about being a spook, and he never got over it. Buck is completely awesome everywhere else in the story *except* when he’s mooning after Dare, who is pretty much a walking stereotype of everything women do to make men go insane. She’s indecisive, never giving Buck a straight answer about anything. She smacks him and then kisses him. She needs to be rescued and doesn’t give him all the information he needs to know what the hell is going on. And the fact that the AI controlling her movements when I was trying to escort her out of a covenant-infested building is dumb as a box of rocks really didn’t help me like her any better. When rescuing her, I never once felt the same passion and urgency as I did when it was me and John-117 saving Cortana from the Gravemind. This could have been eliminated by one of three simple options:

1. Make her less of a stereotypically useless cold-hearted blonde
2. Give her some lines that don’t indicate her helplessness. (i.e. NOT “I couldn’t do this alone”)
3. Allow me to play her as a character, the way I did for all of the male characters in the game

I also hated the stupid subplot where The Rookie has to track down surveillance video and audio of a girl reacting to the Covenant arrival in New Mombasa. This is confusing, because the game’s story line already weaves in and out of the story lines of the scattered ODST team. The voice work in the audio segments is the worst in the entire game. (Read: worst fake African accents ever.) There’s a token nod to feminism, when a sinister government official recognizes the girl on the street and tries to take advantage of her in the back of his limo. Rape is wayyyyyyyy too complicated a subject to address so briefly, and her plucky (but useless) refusal to cooperate is negated by the fact that has to be rescued by the limo driver. My reaction: “it’s great she didn’t get raped and all, blah blah blah . . .” This girl plays no part in the game. We never see her face. Her story is irrelevant to achieving the goal. Why was it included? Why should I care about female characters if they don’t serve any purpose other than to give the guys something to rescue, and they don’t rescue anybody right back?

I heartily agree with Geek Grrl that it would have been super easy to make The Rookie genderless. He doesn’t speak, and it would be easy to either offer the player an option that would enable either male or female vocalizations, or have gotten a voice actor that can do grunts and “ha!”s that could sound male or female. Or even better, they should have hired Morena Baccarin and replaced one of the ODST guys with a female trooper. Just like Terminator: Salvation suffered because there was no female character to fill Sarah Connor’s combat boots, ODST suffered from the absence of the kickass female role models that Cortana and Miranda Keyes provided in the previous Halo titles. I was really hoping to finally get to see some chicks among the several different characters you get to play in this game. We have female Spartans. We have female troopers and ONI officers. So how come it’s still just for guys?

Feminist complaints aside, this is a buy-it-now game from the standpoint of visuals and gameplay. There’s new maps for multiplayer, and the diversity of fight scenarios in the campaign mode means you can play through this one over and over. See you online!