Book Review: The Art of Halo 3

If you're awed by the fantastic visuals of Halo 3 on screen, this book will give you the concept art that were used to create them

It is filled with concept art on the characters, vehicles, weapons and the environment. Each character comes with lots of design variations. Master Chief itself has 15 variations, all fully painted to the point I can't tell if they are 3D or digital paint. Some of the characters include ODSTs, Arbiter, Brutes, Flood and Strato Sentinel. At the end of the book, several pages are devoted to paintings of Master Chief.

The second and third chapter contains the war vehicles and weapons. There are lots of sketches and paintings. The really cool part is they have included lots of different rifles that weren't use in the game. The captions that appear throughout explain very briefly the ideas behind designs, same goes for all illustrations in the book.

The next section is the environment paintings. All look really fantastic and they printed them big. There are a few beat boards and storyboards but not much.

The last chapter is filled with random stuff. There are photos of miniatures, t-shirts, promotional items and toys.

The book itself is hardcover without any dust jacket with low gloss pages. The paper stock is not thick enough. The paper became wavy from the glorious art printed on it. Luckily, it doesn't affect the visual quality of the pictures in anyway.

This is a wonderful book to complement the game, highly recommended to all concept artists, game developers and fans of Halo 3. For the price, it's worth every cent.

Special thanks to Kelvin Chan for providing the book for this short review.

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