Recently, two things have come out whose cost are. . . questionable. Halo ODST and the new Left 4 Dead campaign. Halo ODST being $60, and the Left 4 Dead campaign being about $6. Note that you can get some deals for ODST, and buying it through Amazon, I got it for $50 with a $10 of code for my next game purchase, not a bad deal.
Both of these games have come under fire for just plain not being worth the money and I just wanted to put my two cents in. Consider this a mini review of each.
Halo ODST gives you a very well done campaign, some new maps for Halo 3’s multiplayer, and a brand new firefight mode. The campaign is great fun, even if the whole “mystery” theme that’s being hyped didn’t feel like much of a mystery to me. But the plot was engaging and the characters were likable, and it proves that Halo can get along without any Spartans. Truth be told, I didn’t think Bungie could make a campaign that was worth playing until Halo 3, and this surpasses that. Seriously though, the Halo 1 campaign was crap and pretty much turned me agains the series for years. That being said, I did like some of the gameplay conventions of Halo 1, and a lot of those have been revived for ODST. As good as the campaign was, it’s only going to take you ~6 hours for a playthough, depending on what difficulty you have it set on. I did two runs, one on Normal and one on Legendary, so thats about 12 hours logged in right there. Then there’s firefight mode, which drops you into an area and hurls enemies at you until you eventually run out of lives. Probably because a Brute hit you with a gravity hammer. The fun in this mode isn’t so much trying to beat your old score but is instead all about seeing what kind of cool medals you can get that you would never actually be able to pull off in Halo 3. The last match Orey and I played, I got 3 Killionaire medals. It was magical. All around though, the mode is a great twist and the maps are varied enough that each one feels unique to the point where it almost feels like it’s own mode. One will put you in a large outdoor base where you can steal vehicles and blow up enemy tanks, while another will put you on catwalks where and enemy might just push you off to your death. There are 8 maps, figure at least an hour on each of them, so our total is up to 20 hours. But really, I doubt you’d just play one hour on each. And the last bit of content is three new multiplayer maps for Halo 3. Also included are all of the old maps. So if you don’t want to buy Halo 3 for the multiplayer, you could buy ODST instead. If you wanted. For me at least, this was well worth the buy. Obviously, if you have no interest at all in Halo, it’s not going to be for you.
As for Left 4 Dead. I really still don’t know how I feel about this game so maybe my critiques are biased. I personally think that Valve released a tech demo as a full game. But it was a good tech demo. Then Valve patched it to “make it better” and just sucked a lot of the fun out of the whole thing. Combine this with the fact that there’s been for some reason a polarizing effect on the player base-people are either way to good, or just suck-and you’ve got a game that’s infuriating at times. The four initial campaigns were nice but if you really think about it, one campaign isn’t really any different from another. None of them have many incredibly unique features. So what did Valve do? They released a new campaign. But one that’s shorter than the rest. That’s something that I probably could have done without. But if you did love Left 4 Dead and have played all the other campaigns to death, then maybe it’s for you.
-Tony
