There's a fair amount of confusion and ire at Bungie's plans to release Halo 3: ODST and Halo: Reach as stand-alone titles you need to pay full-price for. After all, if ODST is prefixed with "Halo 3" it pretty much stands the game is merely an expansion (or DLC, as the community has adopted it). But the truth is, after a quick conversation with the game's lead producer, Curtis Creamer, and an equally revealing look at it both recently on Cockatoo Island and at this year's E3, I can honestly say this is shaping up to be yet another solid - and stand-out - Halo universe expansion; not just a Halo 3 update.

I used the word "expansion" above not in the sense of your standard gaming affair expansion, as eluded to earlier, but as a definitive expression of the concept of universal expansion; the growing of founded lore and 'expansive' world concepts - pretty much in the same way Halo Wars is an expansion of the Halo universe, but stands as its own game.



With that in mind, it's a bit silly Bungie and Microsoft would stick with calling the game "Halo 3" and not just "Halo ODST", which would have definitely cleared up a lot of this confusion, but we're getting slightly off-point: the game is a solid stand-alone affair, and should be well worth your interest, which we'll hopefully pique here.

So Halo 3: ODST tells the story of an ordinary ODST soldier (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper). You're not an uber Spartan like the Master Chief and you don't have some weird psychic connection to a piece of opinionated AI. You're a human laying his life on the line in an attempt to stop an alien invasion, and you're doing this all alone through being separated from your squad during a drop-ship incident.

This concept immediately changes the entire series' approach. From the moment you drop out of your pod and land on the ground with not only a thud, but a painful cringe through depletion of your now very mortal HP (that does not magically regenerate ala the series' aforementioned protagonist), you're reminded this is going to be a very different experience. You're vulnerable, alone and completely clueless to what to do next.



In crafting a slower, more intensely solitary experience though, Bungie have opened up the narrative possibilities ten-fold. There's a visor view that allows for a more direct approach to investigation, with parts of the environment you can interact with or examine glowing in particular (which is very reminiscent of the Metroid Prime series, as is the game's mood and atmosphere). There's also a city-wide AI system called The Superintendent who helps you out with info on Covenant patrols, the whereabouts of parts of New Mombasa you should be searching for clues as well as providing you with maps and other relevant pieces of data.

There's an interesting pacing to the game that allows players to cautiously trek the neon lit city of New Mombasa, completely alone and in any direction they choose. You're not forced into any particular line of linear game progression, and you can literally play full games of hide and seek with various enemy patrols you come across.

Being that our new Halo protagonist, The Rookie, is an average human you need to play the game with a more tactical and often stealthy approach. You can't run into groups of Covenant and expect to survive as you have no regenerative abilities and your initial firepower is quite limited. You come into the game with tools to help balance this out though; while your standard ODST SMG might lack the firepower of the Master Chief's standard issue Assault Rifle, it is silenced aiding you in your quest for discretion. Creamer also reassured us any fans of the pistol from the first Halo will feel right at home with The Rookie's pistol.



While much of the game's action is stripped back for a more atmospheric experience as The Rookie, various points of interest revealing details of his team's fate will spark flashback sequences that are completely playable. These are high-action, typical Halo sequences that usually centre around a single objective, though we're told some of them can last more than a few hours to complete. The example we were shown saw a team of ODST working to fix explosives to a bridge in order to blow it up, halting any Covenant ground troop advance.

These aren't typically cerebral in experience, and failing doesn't change the overall outcome given you're simply playing through an event that already transpired, but they do offer more action to what is otherwise being pressed by Creamer and his Bungie cohorts as a detective experience of sorts. It will be interesting to see how this concept is kept fresh throughout, but with The Rookie investigating the happenings of an entire squad in a massive city, you can assume Bungie have been fairly creative.

Halo 3: ODST, in my opinion, is a much prettier game than Halo 3. It helps that most of the sandbox, investigatory portion is presented to you at night, but seeing flaming buildings billowing black smoke off in the distance goes a long way to pushing this higher than Halo 3's visuals. The multiplayer maps we saw are also massive and populated with competent avatars, huge Covenant drop ships and plenty of explosions. The art team have been on a permanent break since the first game, meaning the overall 'look' of the Halo universe (that Total Recall, flat and cement-like look) is still very much the same.



That said The Rookie's various visor views are more palatable and make sense in the grand scheme of where you are and who you're playing as, and also offer a fresh perspective on things (no pun intended). There are various vehicles and more strewn about the game-world at a standstill, representative of the destructive and interruptive nature of the Covenant attack, but these are barely interactive, which is a missed opportunity when players could have been luring whole patrols to vehicles with a mind to blowing them up from a safe position (ala the likes of GTA or Fallout 3 for the creative ones out there).

On the multiplayer front, the game will ship with every single map released for Halo 3 thus far, for a total of 24, with three new maps exclusive to the game. But the most important addition is Firefight Mode that sets a cooperative team of players against increasingly more difficult waves of Covenant. There's no time-limit, so staying through the game is based upon a set number of lives each player has. Once their gone, it's game over.

Of course, the other big announcement comes in the form of the game shipping with access to the Halo: Reach multiplayer beta, right out of the box, which should have rabid Halo multiplayer fans chomping at the bit.

Despite not seeing everything on offer, what we have had close look at is very promising, and the constant reiteration by people like Curtis and other Bungie dwellers the game is strong enough to stand on its own should make the eventual release and your subsequent purchase of, worth it. Stay tuned closer to its official release for the full AusGamers low-down.

For our full interview with Curtis Creamer, check out our video here and our transcript here.