I finally got the Halo 3 beta downloaded late last night and after I finished watching Lost I played a few games. If I have time I’ll get a longer review written about the Halo 3 Beta after I play it for a few more hours, but after playing only three games here are my initial impressions.

Within the first 30 seconds of playing I realized a couple of things. First, I miss the Halo 2 party system. Since I mostly play games with guys on my friends list I don’t mind the multiplayer system that games like Rainbow Six: Vegas, GRAW2, and Gears of War have, but the Halo system is just so much nicer. The option to merge parties after a match and to veto the game type are great options. I really hope other developers see how great this is and copy it, or that Microsoft adds party support directly into the Xbox 360 so it can carry over to every game.

The second things I realized is that I’m not use to playing such a fast paced game. I’ve been playing mostly Rainbow Six: Vegas and a little GRAW2 both of which are much slower paced games. The tactics I’ve picked up playing these games do carry over pretty well to Halo 3. Just at a much faster pace. After getting a feel for the levels I was able to school some guys using some pretty common GRAW2 tactics like flanking and getting an elevation advantage. The other big thing I’ve picked up in these tactical games that helps a lot with Halo is using bursts of fire instead of just holding down the trigger.

I also quickly noticed that a lot of the weapons have had little tweaks made to them. The needler seemed to track a little less, but do more damage. The brute shot now holds 6 grenades instead of 4. The shotgun only holds 6 shots now. It was nice to have the assault riffle back because it seems more accurate than before. The battle rifle works as well as I remember. The rocket launcher seems to fire a bit slower and does not lock on any more. The new weapons are pretty fun to use as well. I had a blast sticking people with spike grenades. Also, the spiker seems to be a solid addition to the dual wield weapons. I was dual wielding the spikers for a while and got a good amount of kills at short range. All of these little changes are going to take more getting use to, but seem like they work well.

I did run into one issue where I was getting a message that the beta was not available but all of my friends were playing in it so I know that was some strange issue. I guess I need to keep in mind there will be issues since it is a beta. My other annoyance is that I have to start up Crackdown all the way each time I want to play Halo 3. This would not be to bad except Crackdown is one of the slowest loading games I’ve played on the Xbox 360. Overall I’m looking forward to trying it out more.