From Myth to Marathon to Halo, development studio Bungie has created some of the best gaming experiences ever burned to disc. The first Halo was the game that put the original Xbox on the map. Halo 2 had one of the biggest openings in any medium, grossing $125 million on its first day alone, and instantly became the reason to subscribe to Xbox Live. Needless to say, Halo 3, the final chapter of the epic trilogy, is one of the most anticipated entertainment events of the year. The game doesn’t release until September 25, but over 100,000 gamers have been playing a pre-release sampling of the multiplayer portion of the game since May 16. This beta test ended on yesterday, and after playing over 100 matches I think I’ve done enough “research” to give you the lowdown.

Beginning with the first Halo, Bungie has crafted easily the most refined and well balanced multiplayer experience on any console. From map design to weapon balance to physics and vehicles, you won’t find a more meticulously and intelligently designed game. Halo 2 upped the ante by adding online play and a brilliant matchmaking system that matches you with players of similar skill levels. With Halo 3, Bungie has refined all of these aspects, while adding a number of ingredients to an already delicious recipe.

The first thing you will notice is that Halo 3 is gorgeous. Many players have been quite vocal in complaining about the graphics, some saying that it looks more like Halo 2.5 than Halo 3. There have been a lot of comparisons to the recent Xbox 360 hit Gears of War, generally considered the poster child for next-generation graphics. While I agree that Gears is a fantastic and beautiful game (see my review of the game here), I think Halo 3’s detractors are guilty of false comparisons.

We haven’t seen Halo 3’s single-player campaign yet, and graphics are generally better for single player simply because the console doesn’t have to process all of the multiplayer data, freeing up more horsepower for the graphics rendering. The multiplayer also has to strike a balance between graphics and maintaining a steady framerate and a lag-free connection, both of which are much more important to gameplay than pretty graphics. Gears looks great but it’s not as stable as Halo 3 is, even in the latter game’s beta form. Gears also doesn’t have to contend with vehicle physics, another drain on the console’s processing power. Gears of War’s multiplayer maps are also quite small compared to Halo 3’s maps, the smallest of which is roughly the same size as the largest Gears map.

But I think the biggest contributor to people’s disappointment in Halo 3’s graphics is the “been there” factor. The people complaining about the graphics have been playing Halo for six years now. They know every inch of those game worlds, have memorized every pixel of every map. When they look at Halo 3 they just see Halo, and they think to themselves, “Is that it?” This past weekend I played Halo 2 with some friends and then went back to Halo 3 and I can state unequivocally that Halo 3 looks a lot better. Textures, details, animations, special effects, environments””it’s all greatly improved. But it’s still “just” Halo. The Halo universe has its own aesthetic, and that aesthetic is worlds away (literally) from that of Gears of War. Where Gears is a monochromatic depiction of a war-ravaged planet, Halo is a Technicolor feast in a variety of environments. Halo architecture has a very clean look to it due to the technological sophistication of the alien races that built it. If Bungie had roughed it up in order to appeal to fans of the latest game du jour, people would have complained that it didn’t look like Halo anymore. Halo 3 looks exactly as it should: Halo, only much more so.

Bungie has always said that the magic of Halo multiplayer combat stems from what they call “The Tripod”: weapons, grenades, and melee. They say this because you can distill the entire Halo experience into a single 10-second event, the one-on-one battle. Once you engage with another player, you basically have those three choices””shoot him with a weapon, toss a grenade, and if he’s foolish enough to get too close, slap him upside the head. All Halo duels come down to some combination of those three tactics. The genius of Bungie is that they made those ten seconds so compelling that millions of gamers are perfectly happy to replay them thousands upon thousands of times. The exquisite balance of the weapons and design of the maps ensures that it simply never gets old.

In Halo 3, Bungie has added a fourth leg to the tripod: equipment. In the beta there are four different devices that you can pick up: the Bubble Shield (made famous by the fantastic “Starry Night” trailer that played during last year’s Super Bowl), the Gravity Lift, the Power Drainer, and the Trip Mine. Bungie hints that there will be more devices in the finished game, but even if they stuck to only these four they would be a big addition to the Halo combat experience.

The Bubble Shield is the most dramatic of the four. If you’re lucky enough to pick it up (there is only one of each device per map, and not all maps have all devices) and you find yourself in serious trouble, you can hit the X button to deploy the shield. With one of the coolest sound effects in gaming, the shield expands into a transparent geodesic dome shield that stops all weapon fire and grenades. However, it does not stop other players from entering the shield, so you often end up dancing with your opponents as they try to flush you out of your temporary sanctuary.

The Gravity Lift is useful to get you up to spots that would otherwise be impossible to reach. It’s most obvious use is for snipers to find better sniping roosts, but clever gamers will find other uses for it. On one of the new maps, High Ground, there is a high wall dividing the map. The lift comes in very handy in breaching this wall without having to fight through the tunnels underneath it. You can also drop a lift in front of an oncoming vehicle to send it flying over your head. Hilarity ensues.

The Trip Mine is pretty self-explanatory. I’ve found that it’s of limited usefulness because after you deploy one, it beeps loudly enough that only the dumbest (or deafest) of players would actually run over it. It’s also bright orange, so unless you plant it underwater or in tall grass, most players will see it before running over it. Obviously it’s more of an anti-vehicle weapon, but even there I’ve rarely seen it used to consistently good effect.

The last device, the Power Drain, took me a while to warm up to but it has come in handy several times. The Power Drain is a big ball that drains the shields of any players (including yourself) that come within its radius. It only stays deployed for about six seconds, at which point it explodes; but usually anyone around it is either dead or running away, so you rarely get any kills from the explosion. The trick is to get yourself out of its radius after you throw it so your own shields don’t get drained. On a few occasions I encountered two or three enemies grouped together and I dropped the Power Drain and backpeddled. As soon as they got within its radius I tossed a grenade and killed all of them because they had no shields left. You can also drop one in front of oncoming vehicles to stop them dead in their tracks. It’s tricky, but very satisfying when it works.

The most important leg of the tripod is clearly the weapons. Most of the weapons in Halo 3 appeared in the previous games, but most of them have been tweaked to make them more balanced. The Battle Rifle is still deadly in the right hands, but some of the other weapons are very different from previous incarnations. The weapon with the biggest change is the Needler. In Halo 1 it was fun but not very practical in multiplayer because it took too long to kill someone. Halo 2 allowed you to wield two at the same time, which made it almost too powerful. In Halo 3 you can only wield one at a time, but each needle does more damage so it is now a fully viable weapon.

Other old weapons that have been tweaked include the Rocket Launcher, which seems mostly unchanged except for the fact that it can no longer lock-on to vehicles. The Magnum pistol fires slower and has a smaller clip, but seems to do more damage. The Plasma Sword no longer lasts forever””it looses a bit of its charge each time you hit someone””and is also much harder to lock-on to opponents. The Brute Shot is more powerful and has a bigger clip, and the grenades it launches don’t bounce as much as they used to so it’s much easier to use effectively.

The most powerful of the new weapons is the Spartan Laser, which is the perfect anti-vehicle weapon. It’s tricky to use because it takes a few seconds to charge up, and during that time it emits a targeting laser that warns your target that he’s about to get fried. If you’re in a vehicle being targeted by a Spartan Laser you also hear an alarm sound. For all this warning, though, many players have gotten ridiculously good with it, to the point where many have complained that it’s overpowered. It will be interesting to see if it gets tweaked further before the full game releases.

My favorite of the new weapons is the Brute Spiker, a pistol-like weapon that can be dual-wielded. It shoots spikes that actually embed themselves in your opponent (or the wall behind him if you’re a lousy shot). These spikes are one of the coolest new effects in Halo 3 because when they first hit a surface they’re still red-hot and then cool to their natural dull gray. If you kill someone with a Spiker you can see the spikes sticking out their bodies. I once got shot in the chest with one and after the fight I looked down and could see it sticking out of my armor. The only thing cooler would be if you could reach down and pull the spikes out.

Halo 2 introduced chain-gun turrets on some maps, but Halo 3 takes them to the next level. You can now actually pull turrets off of their mounts and carry them around, laying down some serious hurt on your opponents. In a first for Halo, when you’re walking around with a turret gun the camera pulls back into third-person perspective. You also walk very slowly and can barely jump at all. Valhalla adds a heavy-duty rocket launcher called the Missile Pod that likewise pulls you back into third-person perspective. Unlike the Rocket Launcher, however, the Pod can lock-on to vehicles.

The grenades aren’t drastically changed, but do seem to do a bit more damage. One nice addition is in the map Snowbound, where Frag Grenades actually stick in the snow instead of bouncing around like they do on hard ground. The Plasma Grenade seems a bit easier to aim, but then I’ve never been good with those so maybe it’s just me. Halo 3 adds a third type of grenade, the Spiker Grenade, which sticks to opponents and even walls and shoots out a bunch of spikes. These are deadly in confined spaces because the spikes bounce off walls and create a deadly cloud of red-hot spikes.

Overall, the new weapons and the tweaked old weapons are much better balanced than in previous Halo games. If the weapon balance stays essentially the same as it is in the beta, Halo 3 will be the perfection of the Halo combat system. Combat evolved, indeed.

All of these new combat abilities mean nothing if the maps are no fun. The beta has only three maps, but there will be many more in the final game. The three maps cover a wide variety of environments””the small Snowbound, the larger High Ground, and the very large Valhalla. Each is better suited to different game types, but all of them are very well designed.

Valhalla introduces a new feature called the Man Cannon (insert penis joke here). Bungie introduced this to replace the teleporters used on many maps in the previous Halos that allowed you to get around large maps faster when you’re on foot. The problem with the teleporters was that people would camp at the exit points, killing you instantly as soon as you warped in. The Man Cannon is a device on the bases in Valhalla that shoots you into the air across the map. This obviously makes you vulnerable to sniper fire as you fly through the air, but you can also shoot back. Although Valhalla has a lot of vehicles, including the very fun new Mongoose ATV, the Man Cannon makes a large map like this much more manageable for those who find themselves without a vehicle.

Snowbound introduces another new design element called shield doors. These shields work the same way as the bubble shield in that they allow players to pass through but not weapons or grenades. There are shields on every door in the map, and as with the Bubble Shield, they encourage a deadly dance with players on either side daring the others to come out and play.

There’s not much to say about High Ground except to say that it’s a perfectly designed map. It especially shines in objective-based game types such as the Battlefield-like Territories, Bomb Run, and, of course, that old stand-by Capture the Flag. It is bisected by a high wall with a gate that can be opened if you fight your way into the base and hit the gate control. As mentioned before, you can also use the Gravity Lift to jump up onto the wall, although usually there will be a contingent of bad guys waiting for you.

Halo 3 allows you to veto maps while you’re in the lobby waiting for the next game to load. Snowbound is regularly vetoed, which I think is a shame. It’s a very good map for certain game types, especially Oddball. But I certainly appreciate the veto option whenever a snipers-only game pops up.

As good as the matchmaking system is in Halo, the real fun comes in creating custom matches in which you set all of the game type parameters. The Halo 3 beta didn’t allow you to create custom matches, but some enterprising players figured out a way to get into custom matches anyway, and I was lucky enough to get into one of those lobbies.

The options available to you in the new custom matches are astounding. In addition to obvious settings like restricting the game to certain weapons or giving everyone an overshield, there are crazy options like increasing run speed and decreasing gravity to the point where you can jump half-way across a map. There are also more esoteric options like vampiric shields, which don’t recharge after you take damage as they do in the standard game. You do get shields back, however, by damaging other players, so that every unit of damage you do you get back as shield power.

I wasn’t the party leader in the custom matches I played so I don’t know what all of the options are. But from what little I saw the custom options are so robust that Halo 3 will have enormous replayability. Considering that I’m still playing Halo 2 three years after its release, this one feature will make Halo 3 one of the best gaming investments any action-game fan could make.

So is Halo 3 just Halo 2.5 as its detractors claim? I’m about as big a Halo fan as you’re likely to find, and I’m thoroughly impressed. The matchmaking system introduced in Halo 2, already the best online system in gaming, is even better in Halo 3. I never felt like I was playing against players who were out of my league, and that’s a huge plus for a game as popular among the hardcore as Halo is. Just try getting into a match of a game like Unreal Tournament or CounterStrike to see how miserable your experience is without a skill-matching system like the one in Halo 3.

My Halo friends who don’t yet have an Xbox 360 are seriously considering buying one just to play Halo 3. And that’s just on the strength of this multiplayer beta. The big sell for a lot of Halo fans is the prospect of “finishing the fight,” as the Bungie tag line promises. We know next to nothing about the single-player story in Halo 3, but considering that this will be the last game in the trilogy, the story is bound to be epic. To put it in perspective, Bungie is calling this their Return of the King. Look for my review of the full game come the first week of October.