After a short but annoying delay the Halo 3 Beta was released Tuesday night. So far I've managed to play over 20 matches online on the three maps made available in the beta. The beta covers multiplayer over Xbox Live and has three game types available: Slayer, Team Slayer and Team Skirmish. I'm able to play the beta because I purchased Crackdown and I can access the Halo 3 Beat from within Crackdown. I'm going to break this post into multiple parts so that they are a bit more manageable. I'll first talk about game play in the beta, then new weapons, followed by the UI change and finally the maps available.

Probably the first thing anyone will notice playing the beta is the graphics. There has been a lot of talk about how good (or bad) the graphics compare to other Xbox 360 games and Halo 2. Halo 3 is a next gen game and does look better than Halo 2 on the Xbox 360 but it is not the graphical leap that Halo to Halo 2 was. Halo 3 will also not pass GRAW 2 or Gears of war on the beauty of it's graphics. What Halo 3 will do is wow you with it game play and incredible matchmaking system.

When I used to play Halo 2 multiplayer the first thing I did was try to find a weapon to dual wield or a stronger gun. It looks like in Halo 3 Bungie has addressed this issue by bringing back the assault rifle from Halo 1 back as the default weapon. This weapon will be your primary weapon in most matches and will give you a solid chance at winning any fire fights you enter. Still the assault riffle is not the perfect weapon and I often will make sure I pick up the Halo 2 battle rifle as my secondary on larger maps like Valhalla.

The default controls have changed as well in Halo 3. The X button is no longer reload, instead you will use the bumpers to reload individual guns. The Left bumper reloads the left weapon while dual wielding and the right bumper reloads the right weapon. This same buttons are used to pick up weapons so the right bumper picks up the main weapon and the left bumper will allow you to pick up a dual wield weapon. You will be using the X button for deploy-ables: bubble shield, portable grav-lift, mines and energy drain device. These will be scattered around the maps and have various levels of usefulness. So far I have used all and hope they have a better use in the single player campaign.

After playing a few rounds of Halo 3 multiplayer you will feel very at home with the game as it is still just like Halo 2's multiplayer but with the improvements that will give people a reason to make the move to Halo 3. It took a while for me to get used to not pressing the X button to reload and I am not to thrilled with the responsiveness of the bumpers on the 360's controller. I think you will send a couple minutes looking around and seeing some really cool visuals in Halo 3 like the water for instance but you will not be blown away like Gears of War. Once those few minutes are over you will be sucked back into the fun that is playing Halo multiplayer. Getting double kills and sticking fools with the new spiker grenade is a ton of fun. Game play is always more important than graphics so in Halo 3 the graphics are good but the game play is great.