Halo 3

Halo 3 Major campaign spoilers, including deaths and the ending. Halo 3 has a lot to finish. Halo 2 leaves Chief on his way back to Earth, Cortana trapped on High Charity, and the Covenant tearing itself apart. The third game walks straight into the middle of all that and keeps going. It came out on Xbox 360 in 2007, and it takes the fight from Earth all the way to the Ark. Chief and the Arbiter are on the same side now. Truth is still trying to activate the rings. The Flood is still a problem. And Cortana is still somewhere Chief needs to get back to. There’s so much to work with there before you even get to the individual missions. The scale of some of those missions is incredible. The Scarabs are a perfect example. You’ve got this huge walking machine moving around the battlefield, firing at things, with enemies on it and ways to get aboard. It changes the entire fight around it. And then The Covenant puts two of them in front of you. That’s the kind of situation where Halo’s vehicles and weapons really have something to do. There’s movement, there are different angles, and you have to think about getting onto the thing as well as surviving around it. The battlefield gives you room to make an attempt instead of reducing the whole encounter to waiting for one glowing weak point. Equipment adds another set of choices. A bubble shield can buy you some protection from gunfire, but it doesn’t stop an enemy walking inside. A power drain can make the place someone thought was safe become a terrible place to stand. It changes what you need to pay attention to during a fight. The story has its own changes going on. Chief and the Arbiter fighting together means something after Halo 2. The Covenant has broken apart, and characters who would have been trying to kill each other earlier in the series now have a reason to cooperate. The game lets that situation stay complicated, especially once the Flood gets involved. And then there’s the trip into High Charity. That mission is unpleasant in a way that fits exactly what has happened to the place. The Flood has taken it over. Everything around you is a problem, and somewhere in there is Cortana. After all the messages and the separation, Chief finally reaches her. I love that reunion. I’ve already said how much those two mean to me, but this is one of the moments where everything they’ve been through together really matters. Getting her back is important in a completely different way from taking down a Scarab, even though both belong in the same game. The ending doesn’t let everybody make it out. Johnson’s death, Guilty Spark turning on Chief, the desperate plan to fire the unfinished ring: there’s a lot happening very quickly. Then you still have to escape. That Warthog run is such a good way to end the playable part of the trilogy. Everything is coming apart, the music is going, and someone still has to keep the vehicle on a route that is rapidly becoming less reliable. You can understand exactly what you need to do while everything around you makes doing it difficult. Chief and Cortana survive, but they don’t get home with the Arbiter. The Forward Unto Dawn breaks apart, leaving them stranded in its rear section. It finishes the immediate fight and still leaves those two with an uncertain future. And that’s only the campaign. Halo 3 also brought Forge and Theater into the series. Being able to change maps, build custom situations, watch matches back and save moments gave people a lot more to do with the game. Custom games deserve a whole conversation of their own, because people took those tools in so many directions. For the practical guides, there’s a lot to cover: skulls, terminals, mission-specific achievements, difficult fights, campaign scoring and co-op. The original Xbox 360 and MCC lists need to stay separate, but I won’t make everyone sit through the entire version explanation every time. Halo 3 gives us an enormous amount of material. Big battles, smaller character moments, a conclusion to the original trilogy, and tools that let players keep making their own fun afterward. There’s a reason a breakdown of this one needs room.