Second Story Gamer

The Halo 3 Heroic Map Pack became free on Tuesday, which finally gave me a reason to download it, and thusly made me put in Halo after a long hiatus from the game. I don’t usually do reviews of maps or map packs but since this one was free and it is very popular, I decided to do a little write-up. There are three maps in this Map Pack of Heroism (very generic name by the way Bungie, mix things up a bit will you guys). I’ll start out with Standoff.

Standoff is a map that strikingly reminds me of Blood Gulch and Coagulation from Halo 2. Standoff is like a mixture of the two maps. The color tone of those two maps is basically identical to to Standoff’s. All three have a very sandy, dirty feel which huge orange-brown boulders littered across the level. They not only look alike, but they play somewhat alike too. Blood Gulch is a small map with boulders littering the ground between two bases. Coagulation is basically a larger version of Blood Gulch with proportionally by size less boulders. Standoff is a medium sized map with a medium proportion of boulders on it. It plays similar to Blood Gulch on a larger scale, though because there are few vehicles on it.

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Rat’s Nest is the name of the second map in this trio. The visual style is similar to Crow’s Nest from the campaign (coincidental name, I think not). It is designed like a huge race track with a wide circular road around the level. This is wide enough for Scorpions and Wraiths to drive on, but the map defaults with only ghosts, warthogs, and mongooses. There are paths through the center of the race track that cut the oval into fourths. There is a well placed rocket launcher used to take down warthogs, racing around the track just picking people off.

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Foundry is the last map in this pack and it is certainly the most interesting. The map is heavenly for any hardcore Forge user. It is basically a blank slate that allows you to put anything you want on it in any place. Of course, Bungie has there own default setup of the map, but it’s not a great position. If Bungie shipped this map setup without Forge functionality, it would be a pretty bad map. Thank god for the Bungie community though, because there are tons of great user made Foundry maps with accompanied unique game types.

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Overall it is a decent map pack now that you don’t have to pay for it. If I was writing this in November, it would be a definite don’t buy these maps. But now that it’s free what do you have to lose? Except for the 500 MB on your hardrive to fit these maps, that is.

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