Only Bungie can get away with throwing a random string of letters after their game's name. Halo 3: ODST? Overdose street? Outdoor, sexually transmitted? Oddest? Of course, the Halo faithful know ODST stands for "orbital drop shock trooper" and everyone else eats up all things Halo, no matter how overpriced they are, much less the letters and numerals on the box. ODST is a sure-fire success.

It's also a disappointment. After all this time, given all these resources, with their enormous success and all their fans, this is all Bungie has come up with? A short single-player campaign and a co-op sandbox? Multiplayer that still doesn't have bots? A scaled down story that still isn't coherent? The same tricks they've been doing for three games? The same aliens shot with the same guns in the same types of levels? Combat that still hasn't evolved? The big hook for ODST is that you don't play as Master Chief, but it's telling that you won't miss the big green guy at all. In fact, you probably won't even notice he's gone.

But in a more important way, Halo 3 is finally the game that shows off what Bungie does best. It is very nearly the perfect Halo and I recommend it whole heartedly. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow.

But first, after the jump, read the review of the campaign mode.

The lead character in ODST is mute and faceless. He could be a real Gordon Freeman for the 26th century if he had a name. "Rookie", as he's called, mostly wanders the nighttime streets of a city ravaged by battle, picking up the pieces after the supposedly interesting stuff has happened. For each piece recovered, you play a flashback battle as another character. It's an interesting approach to storytelling, and it mostly works. Except that the story being told isn't much of a story. It's a thin slice of the overall Halo narrative and heck if I knew what anything meant. Aliens invade Mombasa and...uh, what? I think the rest of Earth has been destroyed, but I'm not sure. I suppose a recap for those of us who couldn't make heads or tails of Halos 1 through 3 is a bit much to expect. On second thought, I've read Halo recaps before. They don't make much sense either. Have you ever met anyone who can satisfactorily explain Gravemind?

The overall framework of the game is a bit like the latest Castle Wolfenstein. You move around a hub city and occasionally split off into story missions. The story missions are like B-side material from the previous games, and not a one of them is memorable. But the nighttime city wandering stands out. These bits of ODST are strangely downbeat, conveying a sense of loneliness and even loss. Who knew Bungie could be so moody? If this were a better game, it might remind you of Fallout 3 or Far Cry 2. Plenty of games have aped the nighttime neon look of Blade Runner, but not many have tried for its sulking noir tone. You can tell Bungie wanted to put Vangelis music in here. Instead, they settled for some jazz bar piano diddling that keeps playing when I'm shooting aliens. Whoa, tonal dissonance! By the way, ODST has a guitar rock riff that plays during a battle on a landing platform atop a skyscraper; it is probably the single worst bit of game music I've heard in the last five years.

The last part of the game, beyond the wandering, is yet another assortment of Bungie's usual tricks. Tedious firefights down long narrow homogeneous corridors. A driving sequence with a driving beat playing in the background to remind you that, yes, this is indeed the crescendo. A cute mascot bearing Important Data That Can Save The Universe.

Throughout the game, instead of the stoic Master Chief along for the trip (what a bore that guy was!), you get a squad of dudes who are the only thing worse than cliched: they are generic. But during the final stages, ODST takes its charming rogue and its icy/hot spy chick on a turn for the Uncharted, and it actually works. Nathan Fillion and Tricia Helfer do a fine job with their romantic tension banter. And just as it's starting to get good, just as your starting to really groove on the two of them, just as you're starting to think "hey, characters!", the game is over.

It's a shame that Bungie can't come up with a character half as interesting as, say, Alyx, Roman Bellic, Three Dog Night, or Sheva. They sure as heck can't do lead characters, but you'd think they'd manage a memorable sidekick by now. Well, a memorable human sidekick, at any rate. Getting Keith David to do the voice for an outcast alien warrior was a pretty brilliant move. And Cortana has long been a wasted opportunity. But it speaks volumes that the most memorable non-alien character in a Halo game is David Cross' unnamed marine complementing you on a good shot. "Seriously, sir, that was awesome!"

ODST has less profanity (I counted one "bitch" and two "hells"), but more blood. A weirdly gory cutscene seems to have dropped in from God of War. The tone of the game - good clean alien-killing fun - hasn't changed, but it's almost as if Bungie decided to take a couple of conspicuous opportunities to live up to their M-rating.

Throughout the city you can find chapters in a radio drama. They're more elaborate than your usual audio logs, presumably inspired by the "ilovebees" marketing campaign for a previous Halo. These serialized fly-on-the-wall recordings re-enact...well, I don't know what they re-enact because I only found about five of them. But while fighting the same battles I've been fighting since the first Halo, I found myself more interested in whatever was going on in those recordings. It tells the story of a young black girl, her wise scientist father, and their plucky robot companion during the height of an alien invasion. Think Half-Life 2 during the War of the Worlds part of the story before the mute protagonist showed up. Whoever wrote that stuff should have done the main storyline, because it's a lot better than the Call of Duty/Medal of Honor hoo-rah squad nonsense that stands in for actual characters in ODST.

But the main problem with the campaign is that it's really just more Halo battles. These are good, to be sure. They've been good all along. But they make for a pretty forgettable campaign. Bungie does a great job introducing replayability into the mix by hiding collectibles, supporting cooperative play, offering the brutally difficult legendary mode, and tracking your score. But the big twist - that, gasp!, you're not Master Chief this time - isn't much of twist at all. Instead of a shield, you get stamina. Instead of dual wielding, you get a new pistol. Because the levels are so dark, you get night vision (a cool electronic sunlight effect). There are no deployables. You don't jump so high. You don't get a plasma sword. But otherwise, it's the same Halo stuff you've been doing all along.

So I don't recommend the campaign. I do, however, recommend ODST whole heartedly for the other half of the game. I'll tell you about that here.