May 26 , 2007. Halo 3 Beta.

Yup. We're playing the Halo 3 Beta cause you know, what else are you gonna do with a 360? Not play the biggest franchise on it?

Halo 3 features great graphics. No surprise there. The weapons aren't anything that different from Halo 2, but you do play in different environments like sand and snow. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be any wind in the beta and the environment is non-destructible.

The programmers concentrated on the fighting graphics instead of the environmental graphics. For example, throw a grenade and you'll see plenty of special effects. But when you walk, you don't leave tracks for very long. They just disappear without any snow to cover them up.

But overall, we'd say the demo is pretty solid at least in gameplay. There's nothing here we haven't seen before in other games, but we'll have to wait for the official game to see what they've added besides the gatling gun, which isn't really much.