Halo: ODST Review

M'kay, my first copy of this was apparently saved as a draft. Yet I have no Idea how to retrieve it so i'll just write a new one.

Halo: ODST puts you in the place of a lonely soldier wandering the streets of New Mambasa after a Covenant ship hyper-warped into space causing him and his squad to crash in the abandoned city. That's a cool-ass concept, right? Moving on to the pros:

The game is a new take on the human-convenant war. It does a great job of making you feel like a vulnerable soldier, yet a highly trained vulnerable soldier. You're definitely not the hulking dispenser of death that Master Chief was, and it's kinda nice to have a new perspective on things. (The health system's confusing, though.) There are 2 new weapons, and one got a paint job.
The two weapons are the Silenced SMG and the pistol. Yes, it's ANOTHER new pistol. It's a little bit like the first one and the one from Halo 3, but it's less powerful. It has the cool scope for head-shoting grunts, though. (The plasma rifle is red now. yay.) The equipment dispensing X button has been replaced with the VISR. Presing X yields an odd change to your vision, almost like a night-vision that highlights everything in a comic-book style. Enemies are highlighted in red, vehicles in blue and "beacons" in yellow.
Beacons are the mission-starting objects that trigger flash backs to your individual squadmates points of view of their crashes. They all have unique missions because they all got blown to different areas of the city and woke up at different times after their crashes. It's a cool plot device and for some reason it doesn't annoy like most other games and movies using this device do.
The voice acting in this game is superb, and it's nice to finally have characters with emotions and senses of humor. They're a fun lot to listen to and give ODST a little bit more appeal to the average gamer. The soundtrack in this game is... different. Let me rephrase that. The soundtrack in this game is better than the Halo 3 soundtrack. The songs fluctuate to what you're doing, and it made me really pay attention to the detail of the music which I almost never do in video games.
Ah, and yes, Firefight mode is awesome. It's an even more awesome version of Gears's Horde, and it proves to be the most entertaining part of the package.

Now for the bad: It plays a lot like the old Halos. Not saying that those games were bad, but... I mean, I'm kind of bored of Halo. The flood of FPS's has almost burned me out. I want something new and innovative in an FPS, but that's asking a lot because there isn't much more you can do. ODST sticks to the tried and true formula, but I'm sick of it. Go there, shoot this. There's some exploration involved in this game, it's almost free roam, but maybe 1 every 10 buildings can be entered and when you do enter them, they're usual one hallway or at most two stories. If this was explanded apon, it would've captured my interest much more. I just am tired of Halo games. Sorry.
The graphics are not improved at all, and may be even down-graded a bit. The environments seem a little bland, and the cutscenes just have a weird feel to them, in my humble opinion. The city is wide-spread, and most of the time when a mission ends you have to walk to the next one, shooting people in the face as you do. It just gets kind of boring when playing as the Rookie.

All in all, it's a fun game for Halo fans and FPS fans. It's got a fun story and good characters, as well as mind-blowingly beast music. But if you're getting tired of the Halo formula, like me, you might wanna sit this one out.

Final Rating: 7.5