´Halo 3´ hands-on

I just returned from Microsoft´s ´Halo 3´ European preview event in Amsterdam and want to share some brief impressions with you. I won´t bore you with the details of the activities, ranging from laser battles to pellet gun shooting, and move on to the game.

Being no huge ´Halo´ fan myself, I had few expectations. Graphically, I was expecting a stunner, though, and I was disappointed on that count. ´Halo 3´ looks better than its predecessors, but not by a big enough margin, I must say. In fact, Bungie and Microsoft reps openly admitted that, visually speaking, it does not compare to a ´Gears of War´.

However, that point does not matter primarily. In terms of gameplay, Bungie seems to have hit the nail on the head. The balancing of the level we played is excellent. Like I said, I was never a fan and played the first two games only a bit. But even with very little practice, I was raking in some okay kills within half an hour. It plays great and looks decent.

I also like the announcements regarding replays. You are able to save entire replays, make snapshots and share the content online. The screenshots look really good, by the way. If I understood the presentation correctly, they are tweaked somehow.

You have heard the news about four player co-op, I take it. Unfortunately, I only tested the singleplayer mission, so I cannot add any of my own impressions here.

Yesterday, I and a few other journalists had lunch with Bungie´s Frank O´Connor and he was kind enough to share some insider information with us. According to him, Bungie had no problems fitting all the content onto one disc, as Bizzare Creations had with ´Project Gotham Racing 4´ (although they later denied such problems).

O´Connor also said that the Peter Jackson ´Halo´ projects are not yet beyond concept phase. It seems that they have merely thrown around ideas and they are still in pre-production.

Later in the evening, I interviewed the head of Microsoft Game Studios, Shane Kim. I hope to be able to upload the brief exchange in a few days.

Thanks to: Areagames (German)