Editor’s note: This review was written by Dorothy Rich, a game design student at Full Sail University. Dorothy has had a passion for videogames since age 7. The first online multiplayer game she played was Halo 2. Ever since, Dorothy wanted to get into the gaming industry. She has belonged to many Halo-related websites, but the one she goes to regularly is http://halotracker.com. Halotracker is an up-and-coming statistical community website for tracking and ranking your Halo Reach stats with people from all over the world. Dorothy is in the art and video department's for the site..

Halo 3 is the third installment of the Halo series from Bungie. It is a first-person shooter for the Xbox 360 console. Halo 3 takes place in the year 2552, when mankind is forced to fight an alien armada called The Covenant. The Covenant’s main goal is to attempt to destroy all of humanity by trying to activate a weapon of mass destruction called Halo. The Covenant is made up of various alien races that believe lighting the Halo rings will make them gods and, in turn, cleanse the universe of any sentient life form that crosses their paths to godhood. What the Covenant does not understand, is that if they activate the Halo rings, they also will be destroyed in the process. The Elites, a race that once carried out The Covenant’s will to try to wipe out the humans, found out that lighting the Halo rings would destroy all living species. They decided to help the humans stop The Covenant in any way they could.

Halo 3 can be played with up to four players either on a single Xbox 360 using splitscreen, system link, with friends over Xbox Live or solo. The control scheme can be changed in various ways to best suit the player’s needs, such as inverted, button layout and look sensitivity. The campaign consists of nine levels, each more challenging than the previous. There are four difficulty settings for campaign, including easy, normal, heroic and legendary. Your goal is to find The Ark and stop The Covenant from activating it. The Ark is believed to be the key in activating all of the seven Halo rings simultaneously. It is believed the Ark can be found on Earth, and it is your job to find the Ark before The Covenant does.

The campaign in Halo 3 starts on Earth. You are a biologically advanced super warrior called Master Chief. You are considered the last Spartan that survived the Covenant’s attacks throughout the galaxy. You are teamed up with The Arbiter, a high-rank Elite officer who fights with you as you battle The Covenant.

When I first decided to purchase Halo 3, I was already very familiar with the previous Halo games and knew I had to get the game on the midnight release they had planned. I wanted to be one of the first to play Halo 3. Some people started right away for the multiplayer aspect of the game. I went straight for the campaign. I believe that playing the campaign first lets me familiarize myself with the game basics before heading right out to battle against people from all over the world. From my knowledge of the storyline from the previous Halo games, it made me want to know what was going to happen to the characters in the story.

I first played Halo 3’s campaign with my boyfriend on splitscreen. That is how we have done so when we played the previous Halo games. I have to be second controller, bottom screen, or else I get confused if I play on top screen. That is the way I am for any splitscreen game I play. We decided to play the campaign on legendary difficulty, the hardest difficulty the game has to offer, because we both were pretty good at the previous Halo games. We had found pretty quickly that Halo 3’s campaign was way more challenging at that level of difficulty, but it was fun to play nonetheless. After about 12 hours of straight gameplay, we had finished the entire game from start to finish.

The cutscenes in between the levels of Halo 3 were epic. Except for the very first cutscene, you are given the option to skip the cutscenes and go on to the next level, but watching them, I believe, gives the player more knowledge of what is going on in the story. It gives you a better understanding of what is going on in between the levels and what is going to happen next.

I believe anyone who owns an Xbox 360 or plans to own one, should definitely buy a copy of Halo 3, if not for the multiplayer, at least for the campaign. You do not need to have played the previous Halo games in the series to follow Halo 3’s storyline, although it might help if you would like to have a better understanding of the Halo universe. If you have never played a FPS before, try out easy or normal difficulty first. If you do decide to start your difficulty on legendary like I did, just remember what the Arbiter says in the beginning of Halo 3, as Master Chief holds a gun under the Arbiters chin, “Were it so easy.”