I’m sorry if you were expecting the second part to my Gravemind series. That will appear next time. First I wanted to look at the way the Flood as a whole are treated in Halo 3 before looking at the specifics of the Gravemind. I know that there are many other places where the Flood are encountered. Halo Wars is the best example of the Flood in another game. But the “Final” in this post’s title is referring to the last game in the Halo Trilogy.
So far I’ve looked at the Flood minions in Halo: Combat Evolved and Halo 2. In the first game, the Flood were well foreshadowed but completely unexpected. They were extremely creepy as a result. In the second game, the Flood weren’t as creepy. They seemed like a quaint nod towards the original game.
Halo 3’s Flood
I guess that deep down I was expecting the same quaint Flood from Halo 2 when I first started playing Halo 3. Boy was I wrong! The Flood in Halo 3 aren’t just creepy like in the first Halo. Now they are downright scary!
When the Flood first show up, you’re not really ready for them in Halo 3. A ship shows up, trailing fumes that can only be Flood spores. The ship crashes into the area you’ve just fought through. Like in Halo 2, you get a weird jarring feeling of fighting your way through the area only to turn around and see it descimated by Flood five minutes later.
Sure the level itself is creepier and darker than the one before. A ship just crashed into it, so things are destroyed and quite often singed. That alone doesn’t make the Flood seem scary.
Of course, the graphical upgrade also makes things look scarier. Halo 3 is on the Xbox 360, which has far better graphics than the original Xbox. So the Combat forms look more realistic when they attack you. But that alone doesn’t make the Flood seem so scary.
Visible Flood Mutations
No, the one thing that does make them seem so scary is how they mutate. You wander up to a marine getting jumped by the Flood babies (the Infection Form) and actually SEE him mutate into a Flood combat form.
Halo 3 also introduces new forms, which can all mutate into one another. There’s a large form (which I think of and Halo Nation confirms is the tank form), which can mutate into the ranged form and the stalker form. And again, you actually see this Flood form mutating. It will mutate into whatever form will work best in the situation at hand.
I believe that there was limited visible Flood mutation in Halo 2. But not to this scale. The Infection forms will jump a corpse and you see its flesh bubble until the body gets up and attacks you.
Flood Biomass
Another feature of Halo 3 is that you encounter environments rich in Flood biomass. The first one is the ship that crashes on Earth. You get to fight your way up to and into that ship. The walls are covered in weird growths, and if you attack one it will burst, spewing forth lots of Flood Infection forms! That was another perfect (and rather creepy!) touch within Halo 3.
High Charity suffers a similar fate, but that will be discussed in more detail next time when I look at the Gravemind in Halo 3.
The Flood in Halo 3 as a whole are back to their original creepy selves. In the third game they never seem “quaint” like they did in Halo 2. Now they are very active and agressive, a terrifying force to be reckoned with. Perfect for the scary zombie hoard they are.
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