Now, as awesome as our perpetual death-maelstrom map was, we began to grow bored of trying to find more things to pile up or trying to jump a Mongoose (the new two-person quad-cycle) over said pile. Fortunately, The Forge was only too happy to provide us with further options for customizing pick-ups in a game that Will entitled Pink Death. For this game, Will created a custom pick-up that would grant the player a 3X overshield, increase their run speed by 300%, grant one-shot kills and also turn the player a bright pink, but only for 30 seconds. To balance things out, this pick-up also increased the gravity on the affected player by two times normal gravity so that jumps were only half as effective (incidentally, this didn't balance things out at all).

While Pink Death was great when you had possession of the custom pick-up, it grew rapidly tiresome for the poor saps that didn't grab it. However, The Forge had even more to offer. While attempting to jump a Mongoose off of one of the Valhalla multiplayer map's man-cannons, we discovered that you could slam the vehicle (and flailing driver) into the stratosphere by smacking it with a well-timed blow of the Gravity Hammer (a new weapon favored by the massive Covenant Brutes in the single-player campaign). To our surprise, this behavior extended to everything hit with the Gravity Hammer, including rockets fired from the rocket launcher.

In no time, we had set up a make-shift baseball diamond on one side of Valhalla with a batter using a Gravity Hammer swatting at "pitches" thrown by Will and his rocket launcher. If you missed a pitch, there were no strike-outs, only charred Spartan remains and chunks of singed Mjolnir armor. We had turned Halo 3 into an incredibly entertaining baseball game thanks to The Forge.

Suffice it to say that The Forge provides nearly unlimited customizability and affords infinite replayability to a game with an already dauntingly addictive multiplayer experience.


Halo Evolved

While an argument could be made that the single-player campaign alone wouldn't quite be enough to garner a 5/5 score for Halo 3, the entire package is more than satisfying enough to warrant it. The Forge is a gargantuan achievement that puts game design in the hands of players, daring you to be creative and invent a Halo 3 multiplayer experience all your own. Of course, the multiplayer is every bit as astonishing as it has been in past iterations and even eclipses its predecessors in many respects.

In a lot of ways, this review is merely a formality, because there's no doubt in our minds that everyone with a 360 and a hunger for viscious multiplayer should own Halo 3 immediately. In fact, there are probably millions of people who do not yet own 360s that should go out and buy them just so they can witness the majesty that is a furious Halo 3 multiplayer match (provided they enjoy serious competition).

Quite simply, Halo 3 is the reason the Xbox 360 exists.