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Master Chief, saviour of the human race and Microsoft's video-game division, is standing on an elevator platform. It's a rare moment in Halo 3, the Xbox 360 blockbuster being released Monday at midnight, when the armoured protagonist -- and the player controlling him -- can take a breath without projectiles fizzing around his helmeted head.
And it's lovely.
There is a window overlooking a tranquil nature scene that stretches to a far-off horizon. As the angle of the light source changes overhead, a shadow inches across the floor of the elevator -- the hero holding a huge hammer that Thor might use to create static electricity. The orchestral score mewls in appreciation.
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It is, by design and through many lines of computer code, an epic scene. The shooting will start again in a few seconds -- the game portion of the Halo series is basically an extended ballistics test -- but creating grand-scale action, with the player in the central role as interplanetary species clash, is what this science-fiction series is all about.
Halo 3 and its dazzling visuals, 50,000 lines of dialogue and frantic battle scenes delivers on those counts. It will please the legions who made the first and second games, released in 2001 and 2004 for the original Xbox, bestsellers -- the fans who also arguably kept Microsoft in the home console business.
But outside of its technical merits, is it a work of interactive fiction that newcomers -- anyone not already queuing up to buy this new instalment -- should pay attention to?
In an attempt to find out, I spent just over six hours completing Halo 3 on easy mode, mostly at a downtown hotel on a sunny day during the Toronto International Film Festival. (When I walked outside, squinting, there was a semicircle of people waiting to catch glimpses of Halo 3 players ... or Brad Pitt.)
That may seem like a short amount of time for a game generating this amount of hype, but if I had chosen more challenging difficulty settings -- "heroic" or "legendary," which make Master Chief weaker and the enemies stronger -- I might still be playing.
To give you some background, the Halo games are first-person shooters, which means you see everything through the hero's high-tech visor. The view amounts to his hands, usually holding one or two weapons, and digital readouts of his health and ammo levels in the foreground of three-dimensional settings. Most of the action takes place on the ground, with Master Chief running around and firing away at aliens, but there are also flying and driving sequences where the camera pulls back to a third-person view.
The first game, subtitled Combat Evolved, reinvented the first-person shooter for the console. It had been almost exclusively a PC genre, using keyboard and mouse controls, but Bungie, the Microsoft-owned studio behind the series, successively translated the camera, movement and weapon commands to the Xbox controller.
Further down its list of achievements, Bungie also sandwiched compelling cinematic sequences in between Halo's many gun battles: Humans are fighting aliens called the Convenant, who are led by a religious fundamentalist, the Prophet of Truth. The Halo of the title refers to a network of automated orbiting rings set to blow up any planet contaminated by the Flood, zombie-like creatures who introduced horror themes to the franchise in Halo 2. Truth wants to use these rings to send all living creatures into the afterlife, and Master Chief and his military pals are out to stop him.
These story segments began to run into trouble in that second game. It offered another playable character, a Convenant "elite" called the Arbiter who rebels against his insane leader, but every time the shooting stopped and the story started, it lapsed further into incoherence.
What Halo 2 did well, however, was push the franchise into online play, where individuals and teams blast each other for points. Its multiplayer battles popularized Microsoft's pay-for-play Xbox Live service -- Halo 2 has accounted for over one-billion hours of online play -- and it still ranks among the most popular multiplayer games on the 360 three years after it came out.
Which brings us, finally, to Halo 3. It picks up the narrative from a comic-book series that was published after Halo 2, but there is no preamble to reacquaint players with the interstellar drama. Anyone not fully versed in Halo lore will be fully adrift, but they will probably be having a good time if they like repeated doses of macho, militaristic action. There are more touches of humour -- alien "grunts" who yell variations of "Run away!" every time their large overseers fall -- but most of the characters are one-dimensional and the ending is more an emergency exit strategy than an act of closure.
More broadly, the story mode now feels like a place for Bungie to introduce new weapons, items and vehicles for the multiplayer action. Among the goodies on display are translucent bubble shields, a cloaking device that turns the user into a shimmering ghost, and turret guns that can be ripped out of their platforms and carried around.
Halo 3 will allow four people to play through the campaign co-operatively, either on one 360 or connected online, and it has a host of new multiplayer features, including the ability to save and share movies of every battle. This is the direction a majority of the video-game industry is heading, away from solitary exercises where the creators script the action to free-flowing online play: The developers make the tools and rules and the players, as a community, figure out what to do with them.
By all accounts, Bungie now spends a lot of its time balancing the various weapons and tweaking how fire fights play out, and it is primarily on those kinetic game-play terms that Halo 3 will be judged in the coming weeks and months.
If you're not into virtual violence, however, the conclusion of the Halo trilogy has nothing that a competent science-fiction writer couldn't get across in four or five pages. It is a technically impressive and feature-packed piece of entertainment software, but as an epic space yarn it never quite takes off.
