While Halo: Reach is my personal favorite Halo game, I have to concede that Halo 3 is the best overall … and here are 10 reasons why. Now that Halo 3 is officially a decade old, it’s become increasingly clear to me that this remains the high water mark for the franchise and I’m really not sure if any Halo game will ever truly top it. There was never any doubt that Halo 3 would be a sales success, but if it had simply recycled Halo 2’sdesign and not offered much in the way of improvements, the franchise may very well not have lasted another decade and counting. Despite being both a commercial and critical success, Halo 2 was riddled with problems, most notably its controversial cliffhanger ending that didn’t sit well with many fans of the series. Halo 3 marked not only the first Halo title developed for the Xbox 360 which, at the time, was still in its relative infancy as a console, but an opportunity for Bungie to address the missteps they had made with Halo 2. You’d have to look far and wide to find another video game that received as much pre-release hype as Halo 3 did.įrom the moment the very first trailer landed at E3 2006 and asked us to “Finish the Fight,” it was clear that developer Bungie was aiming high with its much-anticipated trilogy-capper. Even though Bungie wasn’t quite under the same ridiculous pressure and time constraints as they were with Halo 2, pulling off Halo 3was by no means an easy feat for the studio, which had revolutionized console first-person shooters with Halo: Combat Evolved on the original Xbox back in 2001.