Bradley's Reviews > Halo: First Strike

Comparing this book to the last is a bit like night and day. Where night is nonstop action across the ringworld Halo (with very little in the way of character development), day is like building up many pathos heroes just to tear them down in glorious varied battles on planets, spaceships (human and alien), enough to satisfy any Duty nut.

In other words, the second book was a bit one-note and the third was a bit more like the first, with plenty of build-up and tons of varied encounters. This shouldn't be all that surprising, of course, since it was written by the same fun author that did book 1.

Quite enjoyable, really.
Near perfect if what you want are hard SF space battles and super-grunt work.