A little while ago I might have posted some information about Halo 3's new stand-alone expansion, ODST. Well E3 has just passed you can bet that yours truly got her hands on the demo!
Click on the jump to see what I thought.
After passing the Halo 3 ODST demo line a few times, and passing it up because it was too long, I decided to suck it up and wait to play. So around a half hour later, I was finally inside, controller in hand, and ready to play ODST. Before ushering us in to the demo, the Bungie representative went over some of the nuances in the expansion, such as the fact that you are not Master Chief, the use of health packs, new SMGs, etc. He also explained that the game would come with two discs; one with the campaign of ODST on it, and the other with all of the up-to-date map packs, including the newest three that are exclusively released with the game. 
We played one match of Firefight, which is a game mode in which you battle against waves of covenant forces that increase in difficulty each round. Your team of four ODST's pull from a bucket of seven lives each round, collectively. So, if one person on your team is a bit of a noob, it helps alot if the more experienced players come to their aid in order to lengthen that round. As expected, the covenant troops mainly consisted of brutes, grunts, and jackals with no elites in sight. This is largely due to the fact that ODST takes place in the same timeframe as Halo 2, after the Prophet of Regret destroys the city of New Mombasa. The controls are exactly the same as Halo 3, except for the fact that the "x" button now activates "VISR" mode as opposed to the special items you're used to activating with it. This mode enables the player to see in a sort of night vision which outlines allies in green and enemies in red.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the demo, the fact that the whole team pulled from the same bucket of lives kind of forced us to strategize and stick together. The new SMG is amazing, it felt like it was more powerful and thus a lot more useful. However, I found myself continuously being in "spartan" mode, and running into crowds of grunts under the impression I could slaughter them all. Now that you're an ODST you rely solely on your stamina as your "overshield" in a sense, and that depletes a lot faster. Even jumping from heights that Master Chief could have easily tackled, my ODST's health bar was beeping for me to take cover! Needles to say it took a little time for me to get used to running back for health packs instead of just standing there waiting for that oh-so-pleasant noise to signal the happiness of my health bar. Brought back many memories of Halo 1 believe it or not. The increasing difficulty of the covenant forces was very apparent, which I liked, but it also made the game significantly shorter otherwise. After we were all through, we were given awesome swag pins and little diagrams of the new controls. Playing the demo just made me even more excited for ODST, thank god it's dropping this fall.
