{"id":475,"date":"2009-10-12T11:28:27","date_gmt":"2009-10-12T18:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/?p=475"},"modified":"2009-10-12T11:28:27","modified_gmt":"2009-10-12T18:28:27","slug":"halo-3-odst-firefight-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/2009\/10\/halo-3-odst-firefight-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Halo 3: ODST Firefight Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nHaving completed Halo 3: ODST<\/a> three times and have all of the related achievements I’ve moved on to playing a lot more Firefight.\u00a0 I’ll tell you right up front I’ve really been enjoying Firefight but I do have some issues with it.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 As you complete rounds you earn additional lives to add to the pool.\u00a0 However, once all the lives are gone you stop respawning until more enemies spawn for the next wave.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

My main issues with Firefight are based how the games are run. First, people can not join in progress or leave.\u00a0 Once a game starts if you leave the whole room shuts down.\u00a0 Even if you are not the host or party leader.\u00a0 So, if someone disconnects or lags out at 190,000 the room falls apart and you have to start all over again.\u00a0 This is a really lame and annoying.\u00a0 What makes it worse is that the matches tend to be very laggy.\u00a0 Why does a four player co-op game that does not even have matchmaking support even have lag?\u00a0 I can host a 16 person private room in Halo 3 and many other games lag free, but in Firefight everyone lags.\u00a0 Including me – the host.\u00a0 Who ever heard of a game where even the host lags?\u00a0 Bungie clearly needed to put more time into the Firefight portion of the game.\u00a0 For such a fun playing experience when it works they did a terrible job making it accessible.<\/p>\n

Still, overall Firefight is a nice addition to ODST and if Bungie will patch some of these issues it would be nearly perfect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Having completed Halo 3: ODST three times and have all of the related achievements I’ve moved on to playing a lot more Firefight.\u00a0 I’ll tell you right up front I’ve really been enjoying Firefight but I do have some issues with it.\u00a0 Firefight mode is similar to Horde in Gears of War 2 in that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,5],"class_list":["post-475","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-xbox-360","tag-review","tag-video-game"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andymerrill.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}