Halo 3 audio and gameplay

The sound and the fury

As usual, the music in Halo 3 is among the best in any video game series with Marty O'Connell and his team both creating and revisiting some terrific musical scores (but hey, where's that Halo 3 music album?) Sound effects are also excellent and the voice acting is still as good as previous games in the Halo series.

Steve Downes returns as the stoic Master Chief and Jen Taylor stretches herself a bit as she returns to voice Cortana (to say anything more would give things away). Keith David, as usual for him, turns in an excellent job as the alien Arbitor and General Zod himself Terence Stamp is appropriately evil as the Prophet of Truth. Someone at Bungie is apparently a big Firefly/Serenity fan; no less than three actors from that cult hit sci-fi TV series and movie (Nathan Fillion, Adam Baldwin and Alan Tudyk) voice Earth marines in the game as does Katee Sackhoff, Starbuck herself from the new Battlestar Galactica TV series.

Fans of the massively popular Red Vs Blue Halo machinima short subject series will hear those actor-creators in the game as well.

Gameplay

If you play the single player game on Easy level it's likely you will finish off the single player portion of Halo 3 within a few hours, so if you really want the full single player experience that has both length and challenge you really should play the game at least at Normal level where the enemies are smarter and tend to shoot you faster. Of course there's both Hard and Legendary for those of you who want to play the game at its highest skill level, or if you want to play the game in co-op mode with another player (both offline and online).

Overall if you just want a single player shooter that is action packed, has a solid storyline with excellent voice acting and music, and is just fun to play the single-player portion of Halo 3 will stand scrutiny. It's not up there with BioShock, but it is among the best single-player shooter games you will likely play in 2007. However that is certainly not all Halo 3 has to offer. The game's included community features and map editor are where the replayablity of Halo 3 will surpass BioShock for some time to come.