Combat Training

Alright soldier, this is war. While the walkthrough provides situational-specific information, here's some quick info to prepare you for most combat situations.

New Mombasa

Perhaps the most drastic change to ODST is the addition of an overworld, the city of New Mombasa. Basically, as a Shock Trooper who crash-landed off course, you'll explore New Mombasa city six hours after some serious stuff went down. The city itself is relatively open, allowing you to traverse the streets in almost any direction. As you work your way around, you'll come across artifacts left behind by other ODSTs. Whenever you locate one, you'll 'replay' that soldier's memories, which serve as the game's actual missions. After each mission, you'll be returned to the city where you'll then search for the next artifact.

VISR

All ODSTs are equipped with a state-of-the-art, night-vision visor system. This not only enables soldiers to see in low-light conditions, but the visor also highlights any objects of importance, such as outlining enemies in red or friendlies in green. In low-light conditions, we recommend keeping it enabled at all times. However, you'll have to disable it in bright environments, as

Comm Data

As you explore New Mombasa, you'll come across various Communication Stations that you'll notice are highlighted in bright yellow when using your visor. Interacting with these allows you to listen to an audio file, providing more back story on the ODST universe. There's 30 of them scattered about the city, so keep an eye out for them.

Health

The health system in ODST works a bit differently than it did in Halo 3…in fact, it's almost identical to the original Halo's. In short, in addition to your recharging overshield, you now have a health bar as well, displayed at the top of the screen. As long as your shield remains intact, your health won't sustain any damage. However, if your overshield buckles under intense gun fire, then your health bar's going to take a hit…and that doesn't recover. Thankfully, you'll find health packs scattered all over the place (whether embedded in wall terminals, kiosks, or even just lying on the ground) which will restore your health to prime condition.

When you come under fire, your screen will turn increasingly red, indicating how close your shields are to failure. Once they're completely depleted (as indicated by your soldier wheezing for air), you need to find cover to let them replenish before your health bar takes the hit. As before, your overshield automatically regenerates if you can stay out of harm's way for four seconds.

Weapons

While we'll go more in-depth into each weapon on the next few pages, here's some general tips to get you started. So as you probably know, you can only hold two weapons at a time. As such, it's important that you have both ready to go at a moment's notice, so reload both whenever you get the chance.

Second, in general, Covenant weapons are superior at depleting shields, whereas the UNSC (aka human) weaponry excels at inflicting damage once their shields are down. For this reason, it's not a bad idea to keep one of each on hand. The Plasma Pistol, in particular, is fantastic for removing shields quickly (a single charged shot should do the trick).