ODST is still better than 95 percent of all other games out there, so forget the stupid people and just buy it!

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The campaign only took 3 hours to complete on the hardest difficulty and the multiplayer is the same exact thing as it is for Halo 3, in fact people with Halo 3 and not ODST can still play with people who have ODST.

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So I Pre-Ordered Halo 3 ODST from Amazon and would you believe I recieved it by 11am Launch day! Remarkable! Got the Sgt. Johnson bonus emailed to me same day. THEN, the icing on the cake is, Amazon refunded me the difference when they lowered the selling price! Win/Win. I will always pre-order thru Amazon

Halo 3 ODST is a 5 star game, period. It is not perfect. It is not revolutionary. It is a highly polished, full featured Halo 3 extended experience from a new, fresh point of view. What is so special is the new unique view carries with it the best from Halo CE! If you missed the playstyle in the original Halo CE, One head shot rapid firing Pistol, Vulnerable Health Pack mechanic, and actually characters and plot, ODST will bring back fond memories. I played though ODST for 10-12 hours. I was playing through solo, on Heroic difficulty and looking for the collectibles and secrets. Slowly savoring the story, and fulling voiced dialogue.

Would I tell you to buy it?

Well depends on what you like. Only you know what your tastes are.

If you played through Halo 3 campaign, savoring the moments, BEFORE jumping into multiplayer, then you will also enjoy ODST.

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ODST is great as far as expansion packs go - same great game play, hours of fun - you'll love it. Just don't expect a whole new campaign experience.

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Do not buy this game if...

1) You have a PS3 or Nintendo Wii (only works on the Xbox 360)

2) You hate the Halo series

3) You hate FPS shooters

4) You don't have xbox live

5) You don't have any friends

6) You don't have any friends who have this game and xbox live

7) You don't like playing online with strangers

8) YOU DON"T LIKE TO HAVE FUN

This game is sick! I love it! Amazon gave me an excellent deal on this purchase and I definitely will buy from Amazon again. This game is really fun and it is pretty much 3 games in one. IF you haven't purchased any DLC for the Halo 3 multiplayer, get this!

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Halo games are great and i love all of them, this one was less than i expected unfortunately. still has fun parts about it but overall didn't satisfy me. i would still recommend this to others because it was still enjoyable.

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I'm tired of people talking crap about ODST, everyone knew that this game would be more of a tactical shooter, I haven't received my copy yet but i have played it. For all those potential buyers, buy the game, firefight is amazing and the campaign is awesome, it has a great story line and playing co-op with your friends is really fun, and having a chance to earn the last vidmaster challenges to unlock recon is pretty cool. So if you enjoy a challenge get ODST.

WOW......

I have been waiting for my copy of ODST to get here for about a week, the tracking number is retarded because they can't even tell me where my game is, it only shows the very first arrival scan two days after the purchase and nothing else. Hope the sender loves bad rep.

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This game is horribly short, which is a mistake. It's even worse when you play with someone who has already played it, and he's rushing through.

I was lost from the beginning, partially from my friend rushing through.

The difference between the Halo games 1-3 and this one are dramatic, if only because the color palette has switch from a blue undertone to yellow. ODST focuses heavily on browns and yellows, with a lot of fighting at night that requires the use of a sort of night vision functionality that outlines objects in yellow, weapons in blue, and enemies in red. The change in the palette may seem subtle, but for me it didn't even feel like it was a part of the Halo franchise.

The campaign was really short. Three of us played together on Normal (3 veteran Halo fans, mind you) and finished the campaign in less than 6 hours. Next, three of us played it on Legendary (one guy was new to ODST), and we beat the game in less than 4 hours. So the main time drag the first time through was learning the controls and the levels, and how best to stay alive without the Spartan armor.

ODST is a fun game, but the story is lacking. I would feel better if it were an episode for download for $20, though, because it was so short. I also would have preferred that I didn't get screwed by paying so much for the multiplayer maps, and then 10 months later getting them ALL for free plus 3 more.

If you don't have any of the Halo 3 multiplayer map packs, and you like the multiplayer, then get this game. The map packs alone will cost you $30, and another $10 down the line for the second half of the mythic maps (which are included in ODST). In the end, it's like paying $20 for the game, and $40 in map packs with free Halo 3 multiplayer mayhem.

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I picked this up at midnight so I could join a group of my friends and mow through the game....and it's amazing. I played it for 3 hours or so and I'm already half way through. The graphics are just as good as Halo 3's only a little bit better. The health system is a lot more realistic in this game. Instead of always regenerating whenever you aren't being attacked...you do, but you have an overall health too where if you don't get health packs, you will die. I've been playing on Legendary which is pretty hard, but I have 3 other friends playing with me, so it makes it a lot easier. This game is a 2 disc game. The first being the actual ODST game. The second disc is all the online fun stuff.

All in all, this is an amazing extension to Halo 3 and I call this the game that is going to hold people over until Call of Duty in November. Peace

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Halo is my favorite game of all time. This game has an ok single player but the multiplayer is where this game shines. I love playing online with me frends.

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If you enjoy Halo's story line and graphics you will enjoy this game! Ny only complaint is that it was not as long as I would have liked it to be. It can easily be finished in a day, even on Legendary. I recommend a mission a day to keep the fun going longer.

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Halo 3: ODST has been advertised as several things. For someone from the outside, it would come across as an expansion pack, afterall it does say "Halo 3" in the title. Bungie has tried to brand this as a totally new game however, but unfortunately I think that is misleading.

The campaign mode is totally new and adds some unique and cool features. The VISR mode is very nice in low light areas, and seems a lot more high tech than the flashlight of old. The city map is useful too, and necessary unless you have hours you are willing to spend trying to figure out which direction you're heading in. The city is easy to get lost in, but the openness that Bungie advertised doesnt come through. The maps (or should I say map?) is less linear than much of Halo 2 and 3, but unfortunately it is not all readily accessible in ODST. Routes are blocked off, forcing you down a set path. Preferably, they would remove those barriers, let you loose in the city and say "go find these 5 things in whatever order you please." Maybe that wasn't possible on the engine, i dont know. From what Bungie said in the videos before release, I was under the belief that this would be the case, but it wasn't. In addition, much of the map is recycled over and over. For example, you'll go through an area, find a object that sends you to a flashback of one of the other characters. From there you fight through to your objective, at which point you go back to being the Rookie at night, and then you follow the footsteps of that person, repeating much of what they fought through (only now it's at night! what a twist!) The later points in the campaign move away from this, but it was very annoying and I felt like Bungie was being lazy or trying to make the campaign seem longer than it was.

You are very alone in the campaign too, and very rarely are you fighting along 2 or even 3 friendly AI characters, so don't expect the large scale battles like Silent Cartographer or Assault on the Control Center. That said, the AI seems to be much better than in the past, maybe that's because most of the AI is invincible, it's hard to tell. With 4 player co-op, this makes the campaign seem much more realistic or fun I guess. At parts where you can take multiple routes, it makes it enjoyable as you'll need to flank enemy positions by moving around to different parts of the city and attacking from 2 or 3 sides at once. On legendary, this is sometimes necessary as a head-on attack results in almost immediate death for you and your friends.

Overall, I would say the campaign was about equal to what Halo 2 and 3 offered. Complaints being that it is repetitive (go a block, fight pack of brutes and grunts, go another block, repeat.), it is not open as advertised, and constantly changing characters gets annoying. Halo 1 managed to create an attachment to characters that Halo 2, 3, Halo Wars, and ODST have not been able to duplicate for me. I enjoyed playing only as master chief and not having to worry about other people, and experiencing the situation from a very 1st person perspective and not multiple ones. Hopefully Bungie brings that back for Reach (though I doubt it).

Firefight mode was the other addition, and I will confess it was the main reason I bought the game. It is pretty good, the varying maps are nice, with some outdoor ones with vehicles and some very tight quarters urban maps. It definitely will provide more lasting fun than the campaign will, but I still have a few bones to pick with it. No join in progress kind of sucks, if you start a game (which could last an hour or more) you can't pick up more players, so if you lose one for whatever reason, you're S-O-L. Weapons are hard to find which makes it more challenging, but can also be frustrating at times (having an SMG to take on 3 brutes on legendary kinda sucks!)

Other complaints: Assault Rifle sounds nice again, but unfortunately is a weak piece of junk, the SMG is more accurate, has greater range, and feels a heck of a lot more powerful than the AR, go figure! Pistol is the best it has been since Halo 1, 4x scope, very accurate, but for some reason its extremely weak against brutes. 3 clips worth of ammo into the head and chest of a brute on heroic or legendary wont even bring the shields down.

I dont think I need to review the multiplayer, as their really isn't one. By that I mean, it's Halo 3 and that's it. You can play between the two, so I guess bungie realized not all Halo 3 players were going to buy ODST, which was good and I'm glad they did it. But it also means if you buy the game now, you're paying [...] for Firefight and a 4 hour campaign.

Campaign: 6/10

Firefight: 9/10

Multiplayer: it's halo 3.

Overall: 7/10

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After playing Halo 2 and 3, I thought that I was going to be done with the Halo series. The games were to short and full of glitches. As a matter of fact it took me playing my friends ODST to relized that this game has some wonderful new tools to play with. The editing of the game takes a little to get use to(jumping around in time) but once you have the basic idea of what is going on, there is nothing to do but enjoy the ride. I like the character development and store line in general. I like the fact that you are not as strong as the Master Chief. So you have the play a little smarter. You can't just jump in and think well my shields will hold until I kill everything in sight. Overall I love the game and look forward to Halo Reach.

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I really enjoyed this game, despite the fact that I already own the original Halo 3. I bought the game primarily for the campaign and I was definitely pleased with it. The campaign definitely feels different from that of its predecessors, and that is, for the most part, a good thing. Halo 3 felt a bit boring; nothing interesting really happened. In ODST, though, I felt like each campaign level did something different and fun. I enjoyed the campaign, though, admittedly, it is considerably shorter than previous Halo games.

FireFight is a ton of fun. It doesn't feel like other survival games, like Nazi Zombies or Horde. It definitely has its own feel that makes it unique. After you play through and pass a few rounds, you begin to dread what's next because you know it will be more difficult and you can't just have one strategy through the entire game. It's definitely the most fun with friends, but in the first few weeks, FireFight is extremely laggy over Xbox Live, just as Halo 3 was in campaign online co-op. It has since fixed itself due to less people online at once playing it. If Firefight were an Arcade game, it would be a steal at $10 and worth it at $20.

The multiplayer disc is what makes or breaks the "value" factor for many people. If you already own Halo 3 and you have purchased some or all of the map packs, you feel as though you have bought them twice, which you have. I do own Halo 3, but I still found value in it due to the increased performance from having all of the maps on one disc plus the new Mythic 2 maps (Love 'em!). If you don't own Halo 3, or have not purchased any map packs, this is what makes it a true value. Halo 3 shipped with 13 maps. ODST Ships with 24 maps. The amount of play time you will get out of this one disc is absolutely astounding. I played several thousands of games pre-ODST on Xbox Live in Halo 3 just because it is so much fun. Campaign might get boring, Firefight might get boring, but I always know that I can come back on Halo 3 multiplayer and have a good time.

Because of the amount of time I spend playing multiplayer, this truly was a good value. Plus, the Halo Reach Beta will surely be an awesome glimpse of what is to come next year... I absolutely can't wait.

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Halo: ODST was rumoured a small expansion to Halo 3. However, what you get is a six hour campaign which further expands the boundaries than that of Halo 3, a great new mode built on cooperative called Firefight and an entire second disc filled with every single map released for Halo 3's multiplayer.

Halo: ODST brings about some changes, there is no Master Chief and there is no sight of the game being played by his rules. This includes no dual wielding, recharging shields and gravity won't feel mocked anymore by Chief's jumping. Instead, you'll take the role of the Orbital Drop Shock Trooper, or ODST. These guys don't have all of the strengths of the Chief. They can only aim one weapon at a time. They have a health bar that requires health packs to restore once their light overshield is depleted. They can't jump as high or fall as far or take as many bullets without stumbling into Death's open arms. They handle quite like Master Chief did in Halo: Combat Evolved, and they have a powerful scoped pistol to complete the throwback feel.

The ODST may handle like the Halo of yester year but the campaign among other modes is as fresh and exciting as one could hope for. With the Chief sitting this one out, Bungie has gone from its usual Spartan driven romp and has focused on a more character driven, thus creating one of the most satisfying Halo storylines yet in the franchise. The ODST actions take place during the events of Halo 2 (ah, the memories), just as Master Chief is wreaking havoc on the Covenant and forcing the Prophet of Regret to make an emergency slipstream escape.

However, the big guns of this army is the the new mode firefight. The action is non-stop with one random wave of Covenant foes coming after another. As you make it further into the match, difficulty modifiers, called skulls, get turned on, dramatically increasing the level of challenge. It's a hell of great time. My match with some mates lasted just under three hours and by the end of it all we restarted for another load of fun. Good times.

Halo 3: ODST isn't a true sequel, but it is more than a standard expansion. If you're on the fence about buying it, drop your reservations and go snag a copy. If you love Halo, you owe it to yourself to pick this up as soon as you can.

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