The Escapist, of course, can't just say whether it likes a game or not, it has to intellectualize the process:

Story-wise, it's pulp. Pure, uninspired, contrived, hokey sci-fi pulp, which, if you're fresh off the "BioShock blew my mind, games really are art" boat, will make you want to curl up and die. But let's not kid ourselves: Halo is the story of a cyborg with a curvaceous hologram inside his head, a race of Predator look-a-likes (and their subjugated alien minorities) and an interstellar zombie horde. Yes, there could, perhaps, be a finely-crafted, leather-bound story hidden within those shallow waters, but anyone truly expecting that entity to emerge fully formed from the head of Halo is probably high.

Dude! Wait... what?

Voodoo Extreme says Halo 3 looks like Perfect Dark Zero. Ouch!

Wired points out that Halo 3's minute flaws-- if such they are-- do not detract from its essential values.

Halo hype has been with us for so long that the backlash is already upon us, even before the new game's launch. If you're a gamer, you've heard the carping: What's the big deal about Halo? The graphics are middling, it's just another first-person shooter, the story arc is huge and trilogy-tastic, but hey -- lots of games have all that these days.

Those critiques are all partly true. But having spent a weekend finishing the single-player campaign of Halo 3, I've found that it still has the elusive quality that the original Halo possessed, the one many games since have strived mightily to achieve: an effortless, acrobatic sense of balance.

The author does warn against letting marines drive Warthogs, though.

Heather Newman, the gaming blogger at the Detroit Free Press, played through Halo 3 on easy. The result? Why, the game is too short!

The story is on the shortish side. To complete this review in time for publication after receiving the game Saturday afternoon, we played through the game on Easy mode (to paraphrase Bungie's sniffing description, "Your enemies flee in terror as the game almost plays itself"), and it took about four hours from intro to the end of the credits.

Looks to me like Bungie's insistence that the press play through the game in one sitting is backfiring.

Also... why does Easy even exist? Normal is Easy. Easy is just redundant.

The Freep also picked a reader, Ryan Lenehan, to do a review of the game, which was quite a bit more even-handed.

Hardcore Halo fan Quint at Ain't It Cool News tells his story of his Halo love affair and how he got to play Halo 3. It's not so much a review, but he does have this to say:

The graphics are great, too. The landscapes are massive and incredibly detailed. It’s not as stylistic as something like Bioshock, but if it had been it wouldn’t have felt like Halo. Here you get a look at future African landscape, war-torn and under invasion and then a little later on you get more traditional alien levels.

Quint particulalry liked skulls and saved films.

Australia's PALGN rates Halo 3 highly and calls it marginally better than Halo 2, with some of the oft-repeated gripes about ally AI and graphics:

The most bittersweet aspect of the game is the graphics. While they are an improvement from what we saw in the multiplayer beta and they certainly look good, they will be surpassed in the lifetime of the Xbox 360, if they haven't been already. We were pleased with the newfound vibrancy, life and variety in the environments and the design is among the strongest of the series.

[...]

At it's core, Halo has been about the close quarters combat against tough AI. A lot of the enemy patterns have improved, and new behaviours include Grunts sticking plasma grenades to themselves and going kamikaze. The same can't be said for your allies, as their AI is borderline useless. Four will jump on the Scorpion with you; none will make it to the other end.

Call me crazy, but once the marines are on the jumpseats, it's up to the driver's intelligence to keep them alive by shielding them from fire while simultaneously putting them in a position to put fire on the enemy. Their "AI" is irrelevant here. What are they supposed to do, dodge bullets?

PALGN gave the game 9 out of 10 and said that the extra features, like coop play and Forge, really make the game.

ActionTrip liked almost everything about Halo 3. Except the ally AI.

From a technical standpoint, the thing that pissed me off the most was the AI routines. Even though Bungie claims the AI has been revamped, all that I could see were some new behaviors for certain new enemy units. The friendly AI seems to use the old code as far as vehicle handling and vehicular combat, tactics, and movement patterns go. And, to put it bluntly, they are not really good at it, not by today's standards. Of course, this is my subjective opinion and I may just lack the technical prowess to understand the subtle differences; but, that's just it; I'm a gamer and as a gamer, I can't really see any improvements.

ActionTrip gave the game 92 points out of 100.

Geek.com opines that if you liked Halo and Halo 2, you'll like Halo 3. However, they also like the Flood, which casts aspersion on their judgment:

The enemy A.I. is unrelenting, particularly The Flood. Somehow the developers were able to take one of the most terrifying arch-evil forces and make them even more numerous, gross-looking, and straight up frightening. If there’s ever a jump out of your seat moment, it is during a pitch black encounter with The Flood.

Geek.com will review multiplayer features in a later article.

GameGuru didn't much care for Halo 3, mixing grudging praise with technical complaints:

As I went frantically hunting to yank a chaingun off I started to notice the glitches in the game. The draw distance was atrocious. I could actually see objects forming in front of me as I drew closer to them. I had seen tons of this last generation but I really did not expect this out of a game of this generation, especially a game of such a stature, which had been riding high on such a hype wagon and was crucial to Microsoft’s success.

Somehow I think he got a copy of Morrowind in a Halo box and hasn't noticed the difference yet; the author says, with a straight face, that the environments in Half-Life 2 for the Xbox were better. I own that game and I like it, and I've seen actual gameplay videos of Halo 3. There's simply no comparison to be made there.

Halo 3 is now news for nerds and stuff that matters:

Does it meet expectations? In a word: yes. It's not the best game ever made, and it may not even be the best game this year. Will it make the fans happy, and deservedly sell thousands of Xbox 360s? Very much yes.

Slashdot gives Halo 3 four out of five points. Also, I think they like Yes. Who doesn't like Yes?

Here's a nice non-review of Halo 3:

You can go elsewhere to read how good the game is (though, to finally answer some of the commenters on my recent "Halo"/"Halo 2

TomChick doesn't like Halo 3.

What bothers me most is that Bungie still can't tell a story worth a damn. Because it's an established franchise with enormous hype, this is going to be a huge game. Like Metroids and Zeldas, it'll get unswervingly positive reviews from people who wouldn't know narrative from nonsense, people who make sweeping misguided assumptions about the average guy jumping online and having a grand ol' time getting teabagged and called a faggot. And for those average guys and the occasional average girls, whether they play online or not, this single player story will be the face of gaming: as retarded, confusing, and juvenile as ever.

Ouch.

Predictably, there is no option to comment on this article, so feel free to make your comments here, if you like.

PC Magazine takes issue with a few flaws in Halo 3; the Arbiter's seeming invulnerability and the enemy AI's inability to see you coming (what difficulty did they play at?) bothered them. Nothing positive, in particular, seemed to stand out for them:

It's not the best looking Xbox 360 game (Gears of War has its number, there), and it certainly doesn't have the best story (BioShock), but Halo's (and Bungie's) skills lie in synthesizing all of the above to produce games with maximum appeal and minimal compromise.

They seem to grudgingly give the game a score of 85.

Game Informer liked almost, almost everything about Halo 3:

With a satisfying campaign closure to the series' epic story arc, unprecedented multiplayer options, an innovative video recording feature, and heretofore unseen console mod tools, Halo 3 lives up to every bit of its ever-expanding reputation. However, a few small disappointments chip away at the game's shot at perfection.

One might say it's a good thing Halo 3 has one strand askew; nothing in this life has any business being perfect.