My first impression was wow, and my second was WTF!? I' ll elaborate.
I downloaded it at about 2:30 today, and that process went fine. I jumped into my first matchmaking game excited as hell...
and I waited...
and waited...
and waited. So without any luck I rebooted, went to the same page before realising that it wasn' t a glitch of some variety, it was just how long it took to matchmake on the Beta. Not yet thoroughly impressed I tried getting into a match with Mastachef, & it backed me out.
After finally getting into a game, here' s what I have to say.
The Graphics Traditional Halo fare, but it really did look like Halo 2 with boosted poly & texture count. The water and explosions however were significantly revamped, and looked quite nice.
The Sound The sound was
superb. The environments were quite atmospheric. Most of the returning weapons had significant changes made to the way they sounded, and it really shows. The various machine-pistols actually make you feel like you were shooting something, which brings me to the weapons.
The Weapons If I had to rave about one part of the Beta it was the weapons. I' ll go over a few:
Spartan Lazer: Ridiculously fun with a gratifying feeling after you knock somebody flat with it, but it' s not the best weapon for small moving targets and is better suited for stationary foot-troops & vehicles.
Battle-Rifle: Almost exactly like Halo 2. If you wanted it back & unchanged, you won' t be disappointed, although now I do notice it takes up a bit more of the screen, obstructing your view on the lower righthand side.
SMG: I can' t tell you how much I hated this weapon in Halo 2, and it' s (for the most part) the same. It' s got a little bit extra kick, but it certainly won' t be your weapon of choice on the battlefield.
Pistol/Magnum: ??? I never saw one the entire time I was playing.
Assault Rifle: I was wary about this weapon (It has no zoom/scope, and they mentioned it' s shallow clip, Halo:CE ' nuff said) but I was pleasantly suprised. I found myself using this more and more in games. The clip is certainly long enough for a skilled person to score a kill at medium range, but it' s far more gratifying to dump half your clip & move in for a meelee.
The Brute Spiker: As of right now, this is my favorite new weapon. It' s what the Magnum wasn' t, what the SMG could have been, and oh yeah,
it' s got freakin' bayonettes!!! Versatile, I was killing folks halfway across High-Ground (the one with the gate/choke point), and within touching distance on Snowbound (the snowy one
). It' s a well balanced weapon, with a decent sized clip and wonderful meelee applications.
Sniper Rifles: Both exactly the same
Shotty: I belive has been bumped down from eight rounds to six, but maybe it was always that way. I never used the shotty anyway. I am disappointed in it' s design though. The old inch-high bright-blue sights return, making it look cartoony compared to the rest of the weapons.
Turrets: The turrets were a hell of a lot of fun. Mounting them was cool, but I was thrilled to see that when I tried to dismount with B, it backed me out into 3rd person & had me carrying it around! Massive firepower, but you move quite slowly.
The X Button Useful, yet somewhat overwhelming. You can save footage from your last game without it, and I don' t even remember half of the other strange usages it was though to have, but it' s pretty straightforward. Every time you get some special crap, (I.E. Bubble Sheild, Cloaking, Trip-Mines, Grav-Lift) you deploy it with X. The Bubble-Sheild is quite useless when you' re panicking to find the guy that' s half-way to fragging you, the cloaking is the same old stuff, the trip mines are just as useful as they make them out to be in the vidoc, and the Grav-Lifts are going to keep me busy for ages.
The Maps Brilliant choice of maps for the Beta. High-Ground is incredibly fast-paced, although the choke-point isn' t as accentuated as it was in the videos. Valhalla was awesome (the one in the Vidoc with the river and the two towers), with weapon placement quite good. We did have a bit of trouble finding the sniper-rifle, but other than that I have no real complaints. Snowbound was my least favorite, as it had a mound in the center that had folks from different teams running right into eachother, and it came across as more annoying than intense. The map was pretty good if you went around said mound though.
Beta Stability Meh, at best. It took me ages to get into a game, there was a server-wide " game-over" glitch that brought users down from the 10,000s to about 500 of us, and everything was incredibly slow. Growing pains? Maybe. Standard Beta fare? Definately, but you' d think they' d hammer a little bit of that stuff out on their intranet.
Conclusion Despite the tech-flaws in the Beta, it' s the most fun I' ve had on my 360 since I first got it, and I' ll be giving Bungie my $63 when September rolls around.
What' d y' all think?