This review concerns Halo 3's single-player and co-op campaign component. For a full review of its multiplayer mode, check out our Halo 3 multiplayer review.

To play Halo 3's campaign as a single-player experience, the game lives up to what one would expect from its title; it is very much "the third Halo." The core Halo gameplay is here as strong as ever--sometimes stronger--and everything that fans love about the series almost seems to have been magnified or reprised, but it also is very much a sequel. It does feel as if this is what you might have played if Halo 2 had kept going, and while some of the series' rough edges have been smoothed out, traces of them remain.

Really, this is hardly a negative point overall. The unique gameplay elements that make Halo as a series great are still relatively uncommon, so slotting them into new environments and situations is welcome. The thrill of cresting a hill or entering a large, cover-heavy arena to find a horde of Covenant aliens, and the knowledge that the battle could play out any number of ways--but you're going to do it this way--remains as tangible as ever.

The series' large and diverse selection of weapons, which is a big part of what creates that combat diversity, returns, bolstered by a few new additions. Successively headshotting a row of grenade-chucking grunts with a battle rifle, charging and rifle-butting the brute they were accompanying, stealing the downed foe's brute shot grenade launcher and using it to fire a shot into an explosive barrel adjacent to a cluster of enemies surrounding a turret, then hopping in the nearby dormant Ghost hovercraft to deal with a menacing Wraith tank is one of those heart-pumping experiences that is difficult to find elsewhere.

Most existing fans are likely to initially find the new weapons on the whole less versatile than their time-tested compatriots--though new additions such as the Gravity Hammer, which hilariously sends foes soaring through the air upon impact--but as usual the game's single- and multiplayer components dovetail nicely, and I ended up finding more single-player uses for some of the less crucial armaments simply by being forced to use them in multiplayer maps with limited weapon selection.

Most notably, Halo 3 ditches Halo 2's emphasis on dual wielding and returns to center stage the wonderful gun-and-grenade gameplay theme that the series does better than any other game. There are far more viable one-handed weapon configurations throughout the game than in Halo 2, and for the most part dual wielding becomes something you can do if you're into the whole John Woo thing but never something you need in order to be effective.

Unfortunately, many of the series' continual hangups remain. For both good and ill, playing Halo 3 in single-player feels as though Halo 2 did not end in a bizarrely abrupt cliffhanger but rather instructed you to insert Disc 2 into an Xbox 360 console. Of course, with a series that has such a massive and devoted following, it would have been risky to mess with the formula too much, and Bungie has certainly included plenty of value and freshness beyond the standard single-player--more on that later--but in the core campaign very much plays it safe.

Visually, Halo 3 has a clean, distinctively "Halo" look, although it does not feel as though it has been hugely overhauled for Xbox 360. The game is overall of a higher graphical fidelity, and running in high definition is always nice, but it likely won't be used as a system showcase. NPCs are improved over their Halo 2 chopped-up counterparts, but they still have an odd rough, clay look. Will you care when you're knee-deep in Brutes, Warthogs, and grenades? Not really.

In any case, most of Halo 3's visual impressiveness comes not from texture work or shaders but from the impressive sense of scale; its huge outdoor battles, which few shooters still do particularly well, continue to impress. And, as series aficionados know, its vehicular gameplay remains essentially the best in any shooter--the feeling of smashing a Warthog through ranks of enemies while a gunner mows them down remains practically unparalleled, as does stealing an enemy's Ghost and turning it on him.

There are also a few moments of genuine visual inspiration, including one scene nearly at the game's beginning. For the most part, the game simply looks like more Halo, but in the occasional instances when environments break out of well-explored ground, they show that Bungie's artists clearly have plenty of ideas left to be mined, and more than anything else suggest that the company's next non-Halo project could look radically different.

The sound design, unsurprisingly, maintained its extremely high standard--Halo 3 is one of those games in which reloading is in itself a small joy, with each weapon sounding far more convincing and unique than you'd think fictional weaponry would, and the Battle Rifle is undoubtedly one of gaming's most satisfying firearms, in large part due to its great tactile and auditory presentation.

Marty O'Donnell's score has some of its best moments in the series in Halo 3, particularly when O'Donnell scales down the instrumentation and resists the urge to increase the size of the orchestra or stray into cheesy overdriven guitar overlays--the new piano interpretation of the Halo theme is arguably the most striking rendition of it yet--but I was disappointed to find that overall there is less variety and musical exploration to the soundtrack here than in the last game, with most of the tracks being rehashes or fairly standard series fare.

I have little to say about Halo 3's storytelling, which is peppered with more of the not-nearly-as-clever-as-they-think-they-are musings that took center stage in Halo 2. The plot, which veers between boilerplate sci-fi and generally ineffective emotion, is still largely ignored during gameplay, then given in large, static doses between levels. This is probably for the best, as those who love Halo's established style of plot delivery will get more of what they have already enjoyed, while those who find it less exciting can easily move onto more game. One thing that should please just about everybody is that this game ties things up much better than did Halo 2; there is a bit of a sequel setup, but not one that will leave you scratching your head for three years.

The amount of Master Chief worship in the single-player game--reflected in Microsoft's current ad campaign, which to be honest is more emotionally affecting than anything in the game itself--borders at times on the comical, propelling the Chief into the levels of in-game virtual hero worship occupied by figures such as Half-Life's Gordon Freeman.

What is more frustrating is the continued appearance of backtracking, a series level design issue that established itself in the first Halo. At one point I imagined that it always came down to limited development time, but at this point I think it is simply an ingrained part of Bungie's design sense. Thankfully, there are fewer instances of levels simply being reversed and replayed than before, and they tend to come in smaller chunks, but one can't help but be slightly baffled that this annoying gripe remains.

Continue reading for some of the more frustrating parts of Halo 3--as well as the best.