Feature: Halo 3 beta taken apart- part III

Controls:

Let's talk about what's new here. Reload is now placed with the right bumper, rather than X, and when duel wielding- right bumper reloads your right hand weapon, and the left bumper reloads your left hand weapon. This gives you greater control over your weaponry and allows you to perform tactical reloads. The X button is now the deploy gadget button. The right bumper is used to (press and hold) to pick up weapons, get in vehicles, or hi-jack a vehicle- replacing the X button. The left bumper will cycle through the grenade types. All this may seem odd at first as you'll probably be used to reloading with the X button and such like, however it quickly becomes familiar to you. As in the previous two Halo games, a great deal of thought has gone in to the controls and they work just perfectly.

Other new features:

There are a few new features in the Halo 3 beta which I will now go through. These features are really awesome.

Veto:

Essentially a voting system whereby players who decide they are unhappy with the chosen map or game type can press the X button to use Veto and, with a majority vote, a new game will be selected at random. For example if 5 or more players (out of 8) decide to veto a game of Team Shotty Snipers on High Ground, the game could then be changed to Team Slayer on Snowbound. Democracy!

Party Up:

At the end of a game (providing your party isn't already full) the party-up feature will enable you the option of partying up with the players who were just on your team. For example say you have 3 players already in your party for Team Slayer (maximum party size of 4.) At the end of the game you can offer to party-up. If then another player also does the same, he/she will join your party.

Saved films and file sharing:

Oh this is a truly great feature this is. After a game, you can now save the whole game and watch it back later. Say you get 20 kills on Team Slayer and are particularly pleased with it, like I was, you can go to view stats at the end the game and then press X to save the film. You can then go to theatre mode and watch the game back whenever you want. In the beta options are severely limited, however in the full version there will be options to cut out a particular moment in a match, slow down time, view the game from an other players' perspective and maybe more. Another great feature is the file sharing. You can upload a selection of your favourite films (with a 25MB limit in the beta) which other players can then watch themselves. You can even recommend a film to a friend and attempt to try and lure him to watching a clip of you head-shoting him from across the map.

So, in conclusion, what needs work? (If anything!)

Well- not a lot actually. There are a couple of things I will mention that perhaps could do with a little tweaking, but these are really small things. Bungie seem to have the game's multiplayer down so perfectly, there's not much I can really complain about!

The Needler:

Could do with being made to look a tad more bulky, as you can't duel wield anymore. It makes sense that you can't duel wield the Needler due to it's improved power, however going by size- couldn't a Spartan manage to pick up two of these relatively small weapons?

Talk Button:

Just like in Halo 2, there's a talk button in Halo 3 too. Talking without using the talk button results in the voices coming through the speakers rather than your headset. To team talk through your headsets you must press and hold up on the d-pad whilst talking. This isn't a huge issue but there where some people complaining about this when I was playing. One annoyance is that you can't really team talk and move at the same time- it's not a good idea to stay still for too long in this game! Maybe a toggle on/off talk button would be preferred, or not even a talk button at all- where you just team talk all the time through the headsets.

So there you have it! If there's any questions I haven't answered then let me know and I'll do my best to try and answer it. Halo 3 is shaping up to be everything we expected and more- I personally can't wait for September 26th.