Firstly let me explain a bit about the beta for those not in the know. The easiest way for anyone to get access to the public beta is to buy a copy of Crackdown - an awesome game in its own right. Bungie, the makers of Halo 3, released a public beta of the game onto Xbox LIVE on Wednesday but due to some technical difficulties it was only made available to Crackdown owners early on Thursday morning. Having a 4mbps ADSL line is what counts when it comes to downloading 911.18 MB of beta content as I managed to get it down in under 45 minutes. I must say after playing it for a few hours it is totally worth the 1 GB knock on my monthly internet cap.

Quite a few people have been commenting on one of the local forums about the gameplay videos that have been published on the Internet and what they believe are sub-standard graphics. I wouldn't rate the graphics as highly as something like the ever popular Gears of War but I believe they are impressive as it is. Remember this is a beta and generally that means that there is a lot of spit 'n polish remaining to finish of the game.

From a game play perspective the game is fast and smooth running. I didn't experience a single bit of network lag and that is quite unusual considering I was testing it on a shaped ADSL account against predominantly British and American players. One of the regular Namibian players even managed to play a team match with me over a satellite connection with a average latency of over 900 milliseconds. I don't know what Bungie have done with the network code but they have definitely pulled off some sort of magic behind the scenes.

There are bound to be quite a few bugs cropping up in the game and I suppose this is the main reason why Bungie decided to make it a public beta; to iron out as many issues before the game goes gold. I did stumble upon one or two bugs but they were mainly visual defects and one where the game pauses, takes you to the scoreboard and then resumes a short while thereafter.

Overall I recommend this beta to anyone with a copy of Crackdown and some time to get in and play. If you are a Halo or Halo 2 fan then there is no question, go download the beta as you only have until the 10th of June 2007 at 09h59 to get some practice in before the full game rocks world on the 26th of September 2007.