“We could call it a prequel, but it really does take place just weeks before [the events in] Halo 3,” comments Joseph Staten, the lead writer on Halo 3: ODST. And he’s not joking. After only just a few minutes of getting to know your bickering crew on a UNSC ship cruising miles above Earth’s Covenant-wrecked New Mombasa, you’re plunged straight down to the city’s surface streets in a heavily damaged Orbital Drop pod.

Six hours after impact, you awake — alone, without any idea of where your unit has landed, in a darkened city crawling with enemy forces all looking for your location — and you’ll have to piece together the puzzle of what happened to everyone on your drop team. Without a single Spartan in sight. Yikes.

As an ODST (Orbital Drop Shock Trooper) rookie, your non-linear journey through the massive, sprawling metropolis at night will be spent seeking out your unit’s scattered locations. Health and assistance are at a premium, but thankfully, you’re not entirely alone. The city’s A.I. system, the Superintendant, has been watching over you since your none-too-graceful landing, and its help with various computer-controlled machines, like a health-boosting mechanism called an Optician, will be something you come to rely on. After all, you’re no Master Chief — your shields won’t be regenerating, and you’ll need all the help you can get since every big bad from Elites to Grunts has been alerted to your presence, if not your exact location.

And this is where you’ll also come to learn the ropes of your spiffy UNSC-equipped visor. It packs in two different abilities — low-light vision and hostile-spotting infrared — and you’ll need them both to detect upcoming obstacles and to track down Superintendant-enabled assistance. He’s got your back throughout your journey, so he’ll highlight areas you need to visit as well as giving Opticians and other points of interest a greenish tint through your visor’s lens.

But action-fueled firefights are only part of ODST’s yarn. Your search for your scattered teammates is what will propel the storyline as you’ll come across different areas and/or items on the city streets that will trigger “flashback” sequences played through the eyes of your vanished crew members.

In one area, we stumbled across a giant steel plate that kicked off a sequence that put us in the boots of Dutch, one of the veterans on your team. Nighttime becomes daytime as you slowly discover what happened when he landed approximately two hours after the slipstream event that scattered your crew (which is about four hours before you woke up).

And this is how ODST’s plotline plays out — a really interesting twist that gives the game its unique “classic mystery story” edge, according to Staten. This is no longer all about mere run-’n’- gun brute force; instead, ODST takes on shades of “film noir influences, [including] the music,” Staten tells us. And there’s nothing like a good ol’ fashioned mystery to pique our interest.

But if battling unfathomable odds remains in your blood, ODST’s Firefight mode and its multiplayer online co-op should delight you with its infinite waves of randomly spawned enemies on your chosen map. In this interesting tweak to Gears of War 2’s Horde mode, you’ll first pick a map to do battle on. Once the fight begins, you and up to three of your buddies will have a set number of seven lives to share between all of you. And you’ll have to conserve them carefully as you’re up against five waves per round, three rounds per set, and an unlimited amount of sets…and Brute Chieftains always comprise the last wave in a round. Gulp.

But that’s not all. Each set will be further “enhanced” with the effects of skulls. The skull for each Firefight set remains randomly chosen by the game, so you’ll be kept on your toes every single turn. If you’re skilled enough to survive a set, your pool of lives and ammo locations will be replenished.

The message from our hands-on time with Firefight and the demo we received of ODST is that Bungie doesn’t mess around. Even though Master Chief may not be anywhere in sight, don’t expect this chapter to go out with a whimper.