“The year is 2552. Humanity is at war with an alien race known as the Covenant. We are losing.”
It’s raining. The Rookie sticks to the shadows, his movements deliberate, measured carefully against the delicate downpour of a windless rain. Around him, the veins of a sleepless city continue to glow, the luminous tendrils weaving between decadent plazas and beyond towering high-rises. Yet imposed upon the shimmering screens and golden wisps is not the blurred, rapid motion of a vibrant city populace, but instead the skulking silhouettes of its invaders.
For this is New Mombasa by the light of the moon, a surrealistic supercity once a bastion of humanities ascension, now left to wither and die beneath the might of searing plasma fire. The Covenant have landed on Earth, and thus the battle to preserve an entire civilisation continues on this sodden night within the walls of the African metropolis. But although the Covenant may have had little trouble knocking down the gates, the city beyond wasn’t ever going to be bowled over without putting up a fight. For meeting the invading force in the town squares and the office buildings was not a stoic Spartan super soldier doused in the electric blue and purple blood of his enemies. It was instead the quivering local police sergeant, the grimacing UNSC Marine and the roaming Orbital Drop Shock Trooper steadily charting the streets in search of his fragmented squad. This is Halo 3 ODST, the story of a crumbling city fought over by both the foul and the forsaken, and a damnable recounting of a desperate world trying to defeat an enemy it still doesn’t truly understand.
The story of Halo 3 ODST begins in earnest. A heart-thumping anthem belts out as your drop pod is released from the grip of its carrier ship and the plummet down to Earth commences. After parting through burning clouds and congested skies, a Covenant Supercarrier in close proximity makes the jump to orbit, with the resulting shockwave vaporising the majority of your fellow hell-divers and throwing you completely off course. It’s six hours later that you will regain consciousness following the impact, thus beginning your journey as ODST’s muted, ponderous protagonist.
The Rookie never utters a single word throughout the entirety of the games events, his silence a favourable design choice for that of a permeable FPS character. What he lacks in vocal forthrightness however he makes up for in his utilization. Forgetting the flashback sequences that make up the bulk of the games chapter-based narrative, The Rookie cuts an isolated figure, with his purposeful wandering being the basis of Bungie’s distinctly nuanced approach to traditional Halo storytelling and mission structure. Juxtaposed directly against the usual slew of chaotic firefights and angelic choruses is The Rookie’s far more solemn take on this freshly ignited conflict. There’ll be no battle-ready M808B Tanks lining the streets of a twilight New Mombasa, no passing Frigate’s or fleet of ammunition-spewing Warthogs at your back. There’s only The Rookie, his suppressed submachine gun, his lightweight sidearm and his delicately honed skills. “This is a near suicidal mission” read the scrawling text that preceded the drop six hours prior. There are no victories to be had here but the successful outrunning of your ever-impending doom.
New Mombasa continues to hum and breathe with a distinctive digital whir, but as The Rookie sets out through the labyrinthian trails and pathways that make up its many boroughs, it’s the lack of noise that makes him clutch his rifle a little tighter than usual. Permeated only by the languid strokes of a saddening violin are the snarls and guffaws of restless Covenant patrols, each an obstacle to overcome en route to any semblance of salvation. And as the stealth approach backfires for the very first time, it’s then that the weight of the task ahead becomes truly apparent. This is no battle by any sense. It’s nothing more than a fight for survival, with the Rookie scratching and clawing for life in a scenario already lived a thousand times over by his allies within the ODST order. And so you’ll kill Jackal snipers from the darkness, you’ll scavenge Needlers from corpses and drive them into the abdomens of Brutes, and you’ll be burnt against the heat of round after round of scolding plasma. Bungie’s tweaks to the core Halo gameplay may have only been minor, but the isolation of the Rookie combined with the never-ending onslaught at his fore helps readily distinguish ODST from its predecessors. Survival is paramount, especially when death feels closer than ever.
At times, the narrative and gameplay aspects of Halo 3 ODST seem at odds with one another. On one hand, you have the Rookie’s overtly human traits shining through; his stamina, his health, a lack of force behind many of his melee attacks. On the other hand though, he performs exactly like any Spartan super soldier in his place would. He rips turrets from their podiums and lugs them around the streets with ease, whilst also remaining unaffected by the recoil of particularly cumbersome armaments like the Spartan Laser. The Rookie, like all of his ODST cohorts, never feels truly disassociated from what we’ve come to expect with Halo protagonists as far as gameplay is considered, but these qualms still remain justifiable to an extent.
Halo 3 ODST is a crash course introduction to one of the most enamoured cliques in Halo lore. These are ‘hell jumpers’, men and women who traverse the galaxy in armour-plated coffins and who court suicide with unnerving regularity. An ODST’s career is a picture of uphill battles and lost wars, with the creed that they have been sworn to invoking their lives as forfeit in the wake of any unassailable circumstances. And should those very circumstances present themselves, you can bank on an ODST utilising each and every weapon at their disposal, be it the weighty MG Turret or the potentially bone-breaking Spartan Laser. A trooper eventually succumbing to the relentless onslaught of wave upon wave of enemy combatants isn’t to be unexpected. Dying beneath a pile of alien corpses is a death to be savoured when it comes to the mantra of a Shock Trooper. Perhaps that’s why the games ‘Firefight’ mode was such a fitting inclusion.
Halo 3 ODST was no definitive sequel, though. It was no Halo title for the new age or a game meant to incite a revolution of change. ODST was but a campaign through the eyes of the weary, the weak and the unflinchingly determined, all built upon the bedrock that represents the series’ typically robust foundations. But there was still more than enough room for ODST to make its own permanent impression on the series as a whole. Instances seen through the eyes of the extended squad played out as though they were ‘greatest hits’, showcasing the absolute best that Halo had to offer in terms of mission design and structure. There were vehicle-centric battles against Covenant motorcades, frantic skirmishes through angular city centres and aerial sections in which you coated the clouds with neon fire, raining scorched shards down onto the streets below. Architecture crumbled and fire claimed the skies as the city was ground down by an irrepressible onslaught, the Covenant exhibiting a ruthless efficiency for the genocide of an entire species. But whereas tumultuous, bloody battles against the Covenant empire represent already charted territory, ODST brought with it an entirely different slant on the readily familiar, shunning the expected in favour of something wholly different.
Your objective marker was always visible when playing as the Rookie, but following it generally came second to venturing off the beaten path and exploring the freshly formed ruins of the dead city beyond. For ingrained to the very fibre of ODST’s core experience was an emphasis on exploration, one that superbly encapsulated both the lingering horror and natural inquisitiveness of both the player and the ODST initiate that they controlled. And although it was largely devoid of human life by the time that the Rookie began his journey, New Mombasa never stopped telling the stories of its former inhabitants. It’s partly why the game felt so tremendously alive in spite of its dormancy and tempered pacing. Discovering a fallen policeman clutching an empty shotgun to his breast told of a damning fall, and of another uncelebrated hero left to die alone, afraid. Even the graffiti that stained the city walls spoke with the uncompromising voice of a civilisation wrought by war. ‘Believe’ encouraged optimism in the face of what would be a resounding loss. ‘Glass This’, perhaps evoked something different entirely. Whatever it was though, you were always glad to have found it, to have found anything. Exploration in ODST was something of a morbid curiosity. Finding a few extra pistol rounds in the pocket of a dead-man was a trophy to savour, the chamber they had never had a chance to enter being a whole other tale in itself.
Some of the most memorable moments within the Halo series have been in the company of friends and allies. Wading through the snow alongside the Arbiter and his trusted generals in Halo 3, purging enemies from Castle Base in Halo Reach next to Carter and crew. On each occasion we fought from the front, pushing our enemies back from the most important UNSC strongholds and completing the most integral of objectives. And as battles peppered the surface of whatever planet we found ourselves on, there was always the sense that the war was revolving around us, and that we were but the tip of a spear being wielded by an entire civilisation. And yet on each occasion, we were a Spartan. We were a genetically modified killer, a ritualistically engineered warrior bred for the purpose of sewing death and reaping victory. And as a Spartan, there came the privilege of being the most frequently used tool in the box.
It was the Master Chief entrusted to destroy the anti-air cannon on the outskirts of Voi, not a UNSC Marine. It was Noble Six tasked with delivering Cortana to Captain Keyes, not an ODST. Of course, the decision to send a Spartan into the fight wasn’t a particularly hard one to make. Spartans are stronger, faster, more agile. The front line was simply where they needed to be, with the stories of John 117 and Noble Six being ones of tremendous heroism and unwavering loyalty. Spartan’s were present throughout most of the major conflicts leading up to the eventual defeat and separation of the Covenant, however they did not win the war unaided.
And it’s why stepping into the boots of the Rookie for the first time was so jarring. Gone was the power-armour, the pace, the mandates from Admirals and the notion of being at the pinnacle of the fight. Halo 3 ODST wasn’t about retaliation, nor about reclamation. It was about the undying unity of a squad divided, and the need to finish what had already been set in motion. And so we traversed the nighttime streets alone. We quelled a Covenant siege upon an ONI base and fled the fallen island of New Mombasa with intel in tow. And ultimately, we didn’t do it as heroes. We did it as grunts, as nobodies, as soldiers within a brigade within an army. By the time that the conflict against the Covenant had ended, we had played our part as both rook and pawn, ODST and Spartan alike having fought the very same war, and bled the very same blood.