Halo 3 Legendary Map Pack Review

Bungie’s second map pack for Halo 3 has three maps, Blackout, Ghost Town, and Avalanche, and it costs 800 MS Points.  It’s in direct competition with Call of Duty 4’s Variety Map Pack that came out just a few weeks ago.  Although it already starts out with a disadvantage because the Variety Map Pack comes with four maps, we’ll see if the three maps that the Legendary Map Pack has are worth the $10 that they cost.

Blackout is a remake copy of Halo 2’s Lockout.  Don’t get me wrong, Lockout was my favorite Halo 2 map and I’m thrilled that Bungie made an almost exact copy of Halo 2’s most played map.  Bungie kept the things everyone loved about Lockout in Blackout, like how you can jump up to the sniper tower on a ledge on the main level or how you can blow up the barrels next to the sniper rifle to send it flying across the map towards you.  All in all, Bungie did an extremely faithful refreshing of Lockout.  The main difference is the color palettes of the two maps.  Lockout had blue hues across the map, whereas Blackout has black tones throughout.  Most people get mad when game developers rehash an old map and change very little, but with Blackout, I couldn’t be more happy that they didn’t change anything.

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Avalanche is a remake of Halo 1’s Sidewinder, but it isn’t nearly an exact copy like Blackout is of Lockout.  It is still shaped like a horseshoe with bases on each end like Sidewinder was, but Avalanche has man cannons scattered throughout the map that make it easier to get from one side to the other without a vehicle.  In Sidewinder, if you tried walking from one end to another, it would take ten or fifteen minutes to finish and you would probably be killed by a person in a vehicle on the way there.  The man cannons take away some of that vehicle dominance, but you should still drive a vehicle on this map.  The most interesting vehicle is the Hornet that is on this map.  Unlike the Hornet in Custom Games or the Campaign, this Hornet is missile-less.  The original Hornet was designed to play in multiplayer because it’s not properly balanced but taking out the missiles helps fix that.

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Ghost Town is an asymmetrical map that is based on first level of the campaign, “Sierra 117″.  Ghost Town has the forests and crumbling buildings that are shown in Sierra 117, but Ghost Town is not just a copy and paste of a section of the campaign level.  It is a level that has platforms that you can jump between and a ground level that you can navigate the level through.  The level structure reminds me of a mix of Turf and Warlock (Halo 2 maps) because it is a both vertically and horizontally played map.  You could just as easily navigate it on the ground as you could jumping from platform to platform above.  Unlike Turf and Warlock though, it is a very complex map that will take a few times playing it to learn it’s layout.

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Since Blackout is almost an exact copy of Lockout, I would have expected four maps in this pack.  Even so, the three maps are very good maps that are worth $10.  The Legendary Map Pack is much, much better than the recently made free Heroic Map Pack and, strangely, I’m looking forward to more remakes of my favorite maps of Halo 1 and 2 (Turf, please).  And if your hesitant on buying the pack, remember that they will become free in a few months.  Waiting never killed anyone.

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