Just a brief disclaimer. This review drops some heavy handed hints as to how ODST ends. As such I wanted to warn anyone who wanted to experience the game fresh to avoid reading any further than the first sentence. All others, read on knowing that spoilers are to come.
Gaming’s first detective story has arrived.
I received my copy of ODST from Amazon almost a week after release, the same day my parents came to town. My weekend, normally spent devouring electronic media wholesale, was to be co-opted. I managed to get an hour or two of play time in, enough to get the basics of the game down, and then I had to deal with family matters.
Sunday, when I planned to play, my roommate and his girlfriend pulled a passive-aggressive television control ploy which I, in my infinite superiority, was too passive-aggressive to say anything about. At ten PM, after they went upstairs to have loud sex, I sat down to play some more ODST. At around two in the morning I remembered that I had work the next day and stopped.
Critics have been hard on ODST, and for many good reasons. It’s a brief offering at $60 (which makes me glad that Amazon has dropped the price twice for me now, making the net purchase price $45 with a discount which has made Assassin Creed 2, a game I plan to play to an unhealthy degree, $45 as well) and it has some truly atrocious music. I get why they want to play soft jazz. It’s right there at the start of the essay. But that doesn’t mean you can’t be subtle about it. It’s like I’m watching softcore porn for fuck’s sake. And there are, as others have mentioned previously, some cringe worthy guitar riffs which seem to come straight out of some dude’s parent’s basement. But this is Bungie, and of all their lovely design choices music has never been the strong suit. Yes, sure, it’s impressive that they have a full orchestra, and there’s nothing wrong with their music per sec, but it’s obvious. It’s like the soundtrack for The Watchmen. There’s no subtly there, no respect for the player, and given Bungie’s majority audience, why should there be?
But many people have been criticizing the story for lacking in that traditional “Halo flair,” never mind that Halo games have done atrocious jobs of telling stories. Moving us from one scripted fire fight to the next, demanding we care about characters who are barely developed and taking away the interesting characters halfway through the game as a tantalizing reward for continuing play? It’s sloppy, it’s poorly paced, it’s just good enough to accompany their exquisite design which, let’s be honest, is what makes the Halo games such solid entries into the pantheon of gaming in the first place.
Halo ODST doesn’t have these problems, at least at first. It drops players into an optional tutorial familiarizing them with the new elements of the game. It assumes that you’ll know the basics of first-person-shooting at this point, which is fair. It assumes that you understand Halo’s enemies. But it doesn’t assume familiarity with the topography of Halo’s world, with the layout city of New Mombasa, and that’s where it breaks off from other Halo games and becomes something much more interesting.
Halo games are all about moving from place to place. Shit, most stories are. There are relatively few stories which don’t focus on some kind of physical or emotional journey. It’s the personality that each of these places holds and the personality of the people inhabiting these places that make these stories interesting. Halo is pretty lacking in this department. The Ring is uninhabited. We know the inhabitants of Earth already, and they’re given only the most generic of treatments when we get to see them. They’re the generic “oo-rah”-ing grunts, totally interchangeable, who follow us from fire fight to fire fight. And our enemies are irrationally evil religious zealots who could just as easily be used as a metaphor for the Bush administration or the Ahmadinejad in their unthinking pursuit of manifest destiny and power. The cast, and ergo the places they inhabit, are entirely generic.
The most interesting stories in the Halo-verse have come between games, in places like I Love Bees or the text missives about the end of the world in Halo 3. These stories give us powerful senses of people, real characters, who are exposed to the horrors of war and of the future and are struggling just to deal with it. ILB’s Earthlings tell a more compelling story in their attempt to find a job or get the girl than the Master Chief does while trying to save the world, and I Love Bees was a fucking marketing campaign.
Being a duty bound, badass cyborg doesn’t preclude you from having a personality. But that’s essentially what we’re given: an inoffensive, personality free protagonist. He’s not even a tabula rasa. He’s the most generic future soldier you could imagine, a hero through and through. He’s not angry at the government that indoctrinated him as a child or killed many of his best friends. He doesn’t defy them in the least. He’s a sycophant, just as much a zealot as the brutes he wades through. He’s a zealot with a sense of honor and duty, but without his war, what would the Master Chief be doing?
The same criticism could be levied at the generic cast of marines in ODST, a group of “specialized” troops who receive most of their personality from the excellent voice acting provided by one third of the cast of Firefly and a hot Cylon. It’s hard to care about any of the troops, even the dying Romeo, who I’ve got admit is Bungie’s best marine yet. He’s kind of a wacky sociopath, and it’s easy for me to relate to him while I play, killing anything that moves, begrudgingly following orders and sighing at the incompetence of my squad mates. But we never get a chance to know him, or any of the supporting characters for that matter, partly because of the brevity of the game and party because Bungie doesn’t seem to want to give up any of Buck’s thunder. Understandably so: you don’t hire Nathan Fillion to let him take the back seat. In fact, if history is any judge it’s sort of hard to take the focus off of Fillion unless you pair him with someone just as charismatic (see Dr. Horrible’s Sing Along Blog), but it would’ve been nice to see a little more banter between Alan Tudyk and Adam Baldwin and to get a sense of the history between them.
The game commits some pretty serious narrative offenses in the flashbacks where these characters are treated, but I believe it makes up for them in two ways. First the ILB like audio diaries which, while not as well-written as ILB’s are certainly more concise and flowing and possessed of all the heart and character which ILB offered up. Second, by putting us in control of one of the smartest narrators in game history: the Rookie.
Bear with me.
The Rookie is the player. I’m not saying you control him. I’m saying he’s you. He’s you in every single game you’ve ever played. He’s exploring an environment piecing together a narrative while dealing with violence and aid doled out by an inscrutable God figure we glimpse only briefly. The way the Rookie interacts with the story, the way his movement through the city is hemmed and the way he’s given control of how he interacts with objects inside the city is evocative of the power games give us over their narratives. He’s an active figure without a voice, shaping the plot without speaking a word. When he’s finally paired up with other characters everyone except the author of this story seems to pretend he isn’t there. He’s a gamer, through and through, ignored by the passionate kissing couples until things get awkward, following orders reticently and willing to skulk around in dark places picking up discarded bits of narrative so he can figure out just what the fuck is going on.
He engages games the way we do, given scraps of stories and help from the people who originally crafted those stories. He embodies the way all gamers function as detectives. And he does it by moving through a city with real personality.
ODST does what previous Halo games have failed at: it gives each of its locales personality. Because it’s all the same cityscape they can’t use new pallets or doodad placements in order to make us feel like we’re in a different place. They have to get down to the nitty gritty and make a place feel fundamentally different in its design, layout and purpose. Even when their characters lack feeling their locales never seem to (with exception to the opening flashback sequence with Buck, which seemed almost purposefully generic) and it keeps things bearable between the necessary gaps in the city-exploring actions which forms the core of the game.
That the city itself has such personality is a huge boon as well. I’m not sure quite how they pull it off, but the interchangeable set pieces you’re forced to navigate are surprisingly compelling, perhaps because of the scarcity of resources or the way they shift as you uncover more and more of the story around the city. In fact my biggest issue with the game wasn’t that it eventually forced you into a series of generic Halo firefights, an obvious move to anyone who’s ever played a Halo game. It was that I didn’t get to spend more time in the open-world city finding more artifacts. Another three or four would’ve done it, and the stories could’ve been shorter for each of them. I just wanted some direction in how I wandered the city.
The audio logs offer up a little bit of that, sure, but it’s so hard to remember just where you’ve found them. If the game had a better hint system, or any hint system at all, it might not be so bad. As it stands I have no desire to poke around in various city corners in the hope of finding new bits of story. Maybe that will change when I get some good old gritty noir firefight joneses, but for now I don’t feel compelled to trudge through the streets of New Mombasa without a carrot. That’ll probably change tomorrow, though, when I’m rested and I have some distance from the ugh highway segment which closed the game.
For now I’m mostly left with good memories, though, of how Bungie seemed to get what was wrong with their game and improve it. I’m also pleased with the feeling that I was, for a little while, a detective strolling the streets of a foreign city in a foreign time, piecing together a puzzle and fighting to survive. And I’m glad that, for the first time in what seems like an eternity, people managed to make a game about war which was legitimately funny. Watching a crew of hardass marines drag an unwilling space-squid into a grav lift is one of the best comedic images I’ve experienced in a game this year, intentional or unintentional.
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