Having completed Halo 3: ODST three times and have all of the related achievements I’ve moved on to playing a lot more Firefight.  I’ll tell you right up front I’ve really been enjoying Firefight but I do have some issues with it.  Firefight mode is similar to Horde in Gears of War 2 in that you have four players working cooperatively to defeat waves on enemies. Unlike Horde mode there is no end to Firefight.  The waves will just keep going until you all run out of lives. The game starts with 7 lives that are shared between all four of the players.  As you complete rounds you earn additional lives to add to the pool.  However, once all the lives are gone you stop respawning until more enemies spawn for the next wave.  This makes it very important on higher difficulties to be careful not to die and leave your teammates alone and without an option to respawn.

If you’re just looking to pick up the map specific achievements you can get them by playing with only 20 or 3 people on the Easy difficulty setting. It will take probably 80 to 90 minutes, but the 10 point achievement will be yours.  On the other hand you can get the same achievement on Hardcore in a little over 30 minutes if you have 4 good players who are careful to not die.

My main issues with Firefight are based how the games are run. First, people can not join in progress or leave.  Once a game starts if you leave the whole room shuts down.  Even if you are not the host or party leader.  So, if someone disconnects or lags out at 190,000 the room falls apart and you have to start all over again.  This is a really lame and annoying.  What makes it worse is that the matches tend to be very laggy.  Why does a four player co-op game that does not even have matchmaking support even have lag?  I can host a 16 person private room in Halo 3 and many other games lag free, but in Firefight everyone lags.  Including me – the host.  Who ever heard of a game where even the host lags?  Bungie clearly needed to put more time into the Firefight portion of the game.  For such a fun playing experience when it works they did a terrible job making it accessible.

Still, overall Firefight is a nice addition to ODST and if Bungie will patch some of these issues it would be nearly perfect.