So you think your life is complicated. Swarming around your existence like so many mini-sharks are all the responsibilities you have. Bills to pay. Significant others to keep happy. Appearances to maintain, Joneses to keep up with.

Trivia, really. Put yourself in Halo 3's shoes if you want to know about pressure.

Your predecessors made the Xbox worth buying, virtually. They didn't bring sexy back on the old black box, they brought sexy with them. The first Halo overcame doubts about the machine's chances against the dominant PlayStation2. The second showed what a console with decent online could be capable of.

This time around on Xbox 360, some things have changed while some stay the same. Now, having a slick set of online features isn't a happy surprise - it's expected. Ditto a killer storyline. Ditto awesome, "next gen" visuals.

They're what's changed. What hasn't changed is the weight of expectation on Halo, the franchise. Sure, Xbox 360 is doing great guns at present, but platform defining games on the slick unit have been short on the ground since Gears of War. Not to mention the fact stiff competition is coming any month now in the form of Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat. When it comes to selling Xbox 360 going into Christmas - this is the shining hope for Microsoft.

Let's get one thing straight: Halo 3 does deserve the inevitable, massive sales riches awaiting it. The game is equal parts glorious single player storyline and multiplayer madness. Punters will buy it for the Halo name, for the guarantee that there will always be someone online to play it, and because owning a Xbox 360 without having Halo 3 will become a bigger fashion crime than novelty ties, mixing horizontal stripes with vertical or wearing your favourite footy jumper to the school formal. And at the end of the day, paying $100 or so for this is a no-brainer.

That said, if you're expecting something truly transcendental here, exercise caution. If you've been hovering on the precipice of "next gen" and have waited past Oblivion, Ghost Recon, Gears of War, Forza 2 et al waiting for Halo to make you a believer - you may wish to tread carefully. Because while this is a game only an idiot or FPS hater would baulk at spending $100 on, it's not the game that compels non-Halo fanatics to buy an Xbox 360. $100 yes. $600+? Probably not.

Once again you're Master Chief, and as the awesome trailers have implied - the fate of the world is in no small part in your trusty hands. And beyond that, there's precious little we can say about the ploy without upsetting someone at Bungie. The list of what you can't talk about re: the characters and storyline of the game is long and comprehensive. And you know what? We don't have a problem with that. It's healthy and a good way to ensure that avid Halo fans get hopefully minimal exposure to the games plot before they experience it first hand.

What we will say is that it preserves the rich storytelling tradition of the series, and there's a couple of truly memorable jolts. In the day long review session Microsoft hosted (split roughly half multi and half single player) nobody got close to finishing the game entirely. Yours truly got a tad over halfway through, but that was because I shamefully played on Normal difficulty while my more heroic industry counterparts played on, er, Heroic. This involved plenty of dying on my part even so, and many of the Heroic level players gnashed their teeth more as superior AI seemed to be enjoying handing their arse to them.

An expert player wanting to straight-line the game can probably finish it in 5-6 hours on Easy difficulty. Close to double that for Heroic, and you've got a single player experience that only the most determined (or amnesiac) will finish in a day. But then you've only got yourself to blame if you take this route. Try Heroic and work your way backwards from there - and take your time doing so.

The key defining traits of single player are obviously the storyline and the AI, and Halo 3 slacks off on neither account. It's not War and Peace, but neither was Star Wars. And the level of drama here as well as the stoic Master Chief really does make this the Star Wars for the interactive generation. It's a notion that will constantly come back to you as you struggle atop a monstrously huge spidery walker that's raining death on your mates, or as you tear along in a warthog with an AI gunner mowing down the bad guys. This is interactive drama - stuff that requires a steady trigger hand to go along with your immersion.

On the AI front, I was getting plenty to deal with on Normal difficulty level, and Heroic was giving other punters fits. Grunts are still fodder, while elites and beyond will mess with your head. Rarely will you see a pattern of behaviour in the combat tableaux presented to you. So when you come up against a particularly annoying encounter, you're going to have to use your head. While the enemy changes their responses, doing the same dumb thing repeatedly will lead to the same result. You dying, them hooting at you.

Classic example coming right up: you need to get up a steep corridor. Blocking this corridor is a sequence of partial blockades guarded by elites. Running straight up and trying to nuke them quick just doesn't work. The volume of incoming fire just melts you. Similarly, darting up, killing one, then ducking back just leads them down after you. What eventually worked is boldly exhausting your grenade supply to clear the first set (it took me two frags and a little backup fire), ducking into a side alcove, then wannabe sniping down the next set, darting to the next alcove up, and so on.

The beauty of course is this won't always work. In fact, your experience may be entirely different. But the circumstances of my specific engagement with them allowed it to be pulled off. And of course, if your grenades blast radius isn't on the money, you can forget about it right then and there.

Every engagement has the potential to become a tactical puzzle in this fashion. Some more complex, others not so. But it makes a world of difference from shooting gallery bad guys. You will grow to hate distant snipers with a passion. Especially ones elevated above the action in disconcertingly logical positions. They cover very useful fields of fire and when you have six or seven bad guys already on your tail, they can make your life very tough. Cover will be your watchword.

As good as single player is, multiplayer is our tip for where the majority of Halo 3 players will end up. The game simply kicks ass in this respect, and there's about as many permutations on 16 player combat that you could ever want.

There's the deathmatch/slayer mode. The themed slayer by weapon type. The team slayer. King of the Hill modes, tag-and-you're-it style modes. Everyone against the one guy modes. If it involves loads of players trying to shoot your arse, it's in here. And best of all, all modes are super-customisable - odds are if you can think of it, you can create something like it in Halo 3.

We gave a few modes a good thrashing. Infection was the first. If you're infected, you have the sword. Hitting people with it infects them. Uninfected people basically have to shoot the hell out of infected ones to keep them off them.

There's Oddball. One ball, always detectable on the player HUD. You get the ball by killing the person holding it, then picking it up. And running. You get points for how long you hold onto the ball, so your evasive abilities will get tested to the max as our only attack is melee. In a similar vein is Juggernaut, although you tend to have more fighting options available.

Territories is set to become a firm fave with team play fans. The map has successive capture points. You capture an area by staying in its proximity for a certain period of time. Once an area is captured, you can't "uncaptured" it - it's onto the next. End of round, the defenders become attackers and vice versa. Whoever takes the most points wins. It's an awesome lesson in co-operative play given a pack of similarly skilled players, you simply will not win if your opposition plays as a team and you're a pack of Rambo wannabes.

About the only downer is whether some modes won't get populated enough because everyone's sticking to a couple of vanilla variants. Still, it's a nice problem to have. Knocking players off at close range with melee still seems a little too easy, and grenade spam action also will bug you, but that's the beauty of Halo multiplayer - you can tweak the action to compensate for things which are personally annoying. Hate grenade spam? Lose them from the map. Hate monkeys racing up to you meleeing instead of using their firearms - run with rocket launchers or shotguns and see the kamikazes bite the dust.

This is all good killing fun. There is however one multiplayer mode that towers above all others in terms of sheer enjoyment, and one we genuinely hope players get behind. It's dubbed Forge. Play consists of two phases. The setup phase, where players can have free reign (within a set budget and reality) to rework the population of items, vehicles and spawn points on the map. You can run around in normal mode, but hitting the D-Pad makes you enter a free movement mode - including vertically. You're designated as a floating orb when you're in this mode. You can switch whether you can be killed in setup mode or not, we recommend activating it. That way while some goose is sniping at your team-mates who are trying to populate a flag capture point with defences, you can silently float up behind them, morph into your player self and dispatch them with a swift melee attack or two.

Once time is up and the map is set up to you and your enemy team's satisfaction, you then have at it. Now there's no excuse to whinge about imbalanced maps, lacking defensive positions or inadequate weapon or vehicle placement. It's pure money. And of course it's all playable online. Truly the game's finest hour in terms of creativity in multiplayer.

Of course, you also get all the stats you could ever want in the game's Carnage report. A whole stack of awards are winnable for doing everything from mowing people down in a warthog or other vehicle through to killing spree totals. In team play modes you can quickly see where the dead wood is in your group (or the enemy) and react accordingly. By...changing sides if need be for example.

Backing all this lusciousness up is a easy to use movie editor, so you can make your own action clips. It's not Premiere Lite like the next Tony Hawk game, but it is featured enough for you to really have a great deal of fun putting stuff together and getting the final outcome seen should be pretty straightforward as its all done in game data. Definitely a cool nod of the head to the machinima crowd, and one of those intangibles that Bungie brings to the table even though many punters may not ever touch it.

All this sounds glowing, yo. And high praise is due to Bungie for making a game which strongly resonates the Halo theme and universe. But... and it's kind of unfair to say this, but we'd have liked it to look better. More juicy visuals - yes they look better to Halo 2 but they're nowhere near as good as some other efforts already out on Xbox 360 (looking once again at Gears of War here, but there's others too). This is fair and square in "evolution, not revolution" territory visually.

We're not downing Halo's visuals by any stretch, just pointing out the obvious. If you're a Halo devotee, you're likely to be happy. If you're a punter fresh off BioShock and Gears, and looking forward to Call of Duty 4, Far Cry 2, et al - you may be wondering whether Halo 3 is Being All It Can Be in the looks department.

You do get a great frame rate as a trade-off - but if next gen is defined by ultra realistic high def visuals that really make you think you're a part of the game world - Halo 3 comes short. The storyline will get you there, but the visuals won't essentially. And strangely it's more often the indoor areas and vehicles that let the side down more than the usually-much-harder-to-make-look-cool outdoors. There's a level of generic sci-fi about them you just don't pick up on when you're rolling through light forest in particular.

For hardcore devotees, it's a seemingly superficial point to pick out, but one that is hard to avoid for many punters. If you truly could care less about visuals, then disregard. If on the other hand you're hanging out for an ultra high def, slick and polished Halo 3 experience representing a monster leap from Halo 2 - you may not be 100% stoked with the outcome.

Very few games come to mind as ones that justify buying a console or PC to play. The first Halo qualifies. Mario 64 qualifies. Battlefield 2 (to our minds) qualifies. Hell, we'd argue Gears of War was Xbox 360s first (and arguably still the only) game which justifies buying that console over any other. But if Gears failed to move you, think carefully whether Halo 3 has got what it takes to change your mind.

Just like Resistance: Fall of Man was a great game saddled with overweight expectations on PS3, so too does Halo 3 fall short of impossibly lofty goals. In this case, the loser is the visual department - and if one has to make compromises, this is arguably the "right" pace to do it. At the end of the day it's a very, very good shooter - just not the second coming. Virtually all the boxes are ticked but the looks department - and it's no slouch there either. But being blunt: it's not console FPS 2.0. Buy it if you already have a Xbox 360 without reservation. If you're basing investing in the platform on the basis of this game - do whatever you can to give it a sustained play before making the jump.