Standard Edition: Collector's Edition: Legendary Edition: Price: £49.99 / £49.99 / £99.99 Players: 1-4 offline, 2-16 online Widescreen: Yes 50Hz/60Hz: No/Yes Dolby Digital 5.1 sound: Yes Xbox Live-enabled: Yes Halo 3 concludes the trilogy of the Halo series, not quite beginning where Halo 2 finished, but with the bridge of the comic series Halo: Uprising inbetween then and now. The third game begins with you, as Master Chief, crash-landing in the woods after entering Earth's atmosphere and being picked up by Sgt Major Avery Johnson and his squad, before heading to a United Nations Space Command (UNSC) outpost, but then the attacks from the Covenant and the Flood begin again and that sets the tone for more blasting action as per the first two entries, with their aim being to set off the Halos floating out in space to result in the end of our civilisation.

For one of the most-anticipated games of the year, however, Halo 3, has come across as rather a disappointment, as was the second entry. It's a great exercise in crash/bang/wallop for a shooter, but it's a short-lived experience. Frequently, you'll take a beating, leaving your health at such a low level that it's flashing red but occasionally during even these moments you can take one or two hits - which is good since it didn't take long for it to be sapped away, and then you just need to hang back for a moment and your health levels will improve back to full strength. The scenery looks nice, but as the poet William Henry Davies said, "We have no time to stand and stare", since you do just run through almost-randomly shooting at things, like I have tended to do in the occasional online multiplayer game, and hoping enough shots hit. And while the storyline does it for some people, I've never been massively gripped by the one provided in Halo and just want some engaging action, but this one gets very repetitive, even for this short game, and it all results in a rather unexciting result. There's also many checkpoints so it's not at all difficult to progress for the majority of the time and there won't be many sections on which you'll get stuck, and I was on 'Heroic'.

When it comes to what to shoot with, Spikers are a great weapon, I find, since they home in on the target and 'lock on' so will explode once you've shot out a few, usually killing them. You can also pick up gun turrets to fire independently of the usual turret/shield combination. This is one of the weapons, such as a flamethrower and plasma cannon, which slows you down as you move about, since they're so heavy, and you'll switch to a third-person view when carrying these. They can't be easily switched with others, given their weight, so you'll drop them when you're out of ammo. I also took great pleasure with the Gravity Hammer - that's if you can get it off the big bastard that's holding it - since one thwack of that to the ground and no-one will ever get in your way. Like Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy, I felt that this was my "Boomstick"! Baddies often use the same old trick of showing up to fire off a few shots, then wander off a moment, then come back and fire some more, and so on. Occasionally, they'll have a bit more AI to them than that, and not do every last thing that's expected of them, but then they're effectively programmed to track you down and wipe you out, so if you head for the same places when re-trying a scene then they're likely to traverse the same path to you.

Useful pick-ups you'll find along the way are the bubble shield and a gravity lift for helping you quickly get to higher ground to escape the baddies. However, while the former sounds like it'll solve all your problems in a heavy fight, the enemy can walk straight into it and kick your sorry backside, just as you can walk into theirs. For other additions, there are hidden skulls which can cause change in gameplay such as changing in-game dialogue, or improving enemy health and behaviour, while vehicles include old favourite, Warthog, and the Brute Prowler, a two-person mode of transportation with turrets. Online action is not something I've experienced for a while, but in this release, your options take you across 11 maps with up to 16 players, with 'Slayer' and 'Team Slayer' (replace 'Slayer' with 'Deathmatch'), 'Capture the Flag' and 'Territories', the latter being similar to the previous one in that you need to take control of several sections of the map. There's also a Last Man Standing-style with 'Infection' where some of you start off as sword-wielding zombies and have to bump off all the others until there's one normal player left. Further options in which to indulge are 'The Forge' which allows you to take any current multiplayer map from the game and add/remove objects, weapons and vehicles etc., while 'Theatre' mode utilises the fact that all online activity is being recorded and enables you to watch, edit and take screengrabs of your favourite moments. These mini-movies can all be saved to a file-sharing area where other players can watch them and recommend them to their friends.

The Halo 3 TV trailer: "Believe in a Hero" I know some will say I'm missing out by sticking to the single-player mode of a game like this but whenever I go online it barely takes seconds before someone takes delight in opening a can of "Whupp Ass", and so, to me, Halo 3 becomes a relentless same old battle amongst the same old enemies and it gets tiresome. If you're in the same boat and not sure whether to make the purchase, then at least you should rent it. That said, for those who are checking out the three different versions of the game, linked above, and wondering which to get, all three contain the main disc and manual, the top two also include an interactive Xbox 360 bonus disc with several featurettes, as well as a 'Beastiarum' which appears in the Collector's Edition asa hardcover bound collection of information and art, whereas the more expensive Legendary Edition has all this info on a DVD. That release also contains a Legendary DVD with further exclusive content and a scale replica of the Master Chief helmet as a case for the three discs. The first two editions are both £49.99 each while the latter is £99.99. The version we received for review was the Standard Edition. Finally, although I've uploaded the "Believe in a Hero" Halo 3 TV trailer (see right - and please tell me what the music is!), I was hoping to show some video footage from this game, but it's PAL-60-only so I can't record it. My DVD recorder thinks it's getting an NTSC signal and my TiVo just doesn't see it at all. If anyone can recommend a reasonable and cheap convertor for the occasional game like this, please let me know, as I was hoping to provide the same content as I did with my review of THQ's Stuntman: Ignition which had some fantastic results.

GRAPHICS SOUND EFFECTS AND MUSIC PLAYABILITY ENJOYMENT OVERALL Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 2007. [Up to the top of this page] DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier. PC games reviewed by the editor are on: Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP