Halo Wars – Reviewed – Xbox 360

Familiar Faces

As far as units are concerned, you can expect the full line-up from the FPS (As seen in the hit blockbuster Halo 3, in stores now!).

Where vehicles are concerned, you can expect everything from Warthogs, Hornets and Scorpions to Banshees and Wraiths for the Covenant side. When it comes to standard units, you have the standard fare of marine and flamethrower squads.

The true magic comes in the upgrades, which will enable squads like marines to carry RPG’s or to have a medic in the group. Max the marines upgrades out and you even get to call in the specialised ODST squads (Coming to a console near you), and have the ability to be dropped in anywhere on the map. Sure, Master Chief isn’t in the game but fans will still love the fact that you can create Spartans (the first kind that didn’t kick ass quite as much).

Spartans are pretty damn tough (they have suit shields just like Master Chief) and can be upgraded to carry bigger weapons such as that massive anti-vehicle laser rifle cannon or a huge chaingun. Their special ability comes straight out of the FPS series, and will have you smiling while you sit back and watch a Spartan hop onto an enemy vehicle and hijack it for him/herself (yes some Spartans are female). You are limited to only three spartans, but most of the time, that is all you will need.

On the whole, every thing is quite balanced and none of the units feel too overpowered, with strategy and variety usually being your best bet when attacking the enemy.

When playing as the UNSC, you also have a few abilities that come from the Spirit of Fire (your big ship floating up above you in space). These abilities range from the use of a super weapon or air-strike, as well as things like transport pick-ups and unit healing/repairs.

Half A Glass of Campaign Please

The campaign was a lot of fun, but is unfortunately short, only lasting somewhere in the 8 hour region for me on my play-through on medium. What was a real sore point for me was that we have all become accustomed to playing through RTS games with both sides, and in this case there was no Covenant campaign to be found.

DLC maybe? I can’t help but feel that it should have been included in the full game, with the flood as DLC.

The game does however also have the hidden skulls idea from Halo 3. Activating the skulls can make your missions easier with a score penalty or even more difficult with bonus points and finding them during each mission is sure to keep you busy. Even without the skulls, a second play through the game is definitely an option. It’s fun and engaging and you can go back and redo missions to try and finish them with a gold medal.

Because we played the review build about 2 weeks before the games release, we were not able to give the multiplayer a proper go, although the game does ship with a very decent Skirmish mode and more importantly, the ability to play through the entire game co-operatively with a friend.

One, Two, Three, Four, I Declare Thumb War

There have been various attempts at console RTS games so far, ranging from the Command & Conquer series to the new Tom Clancy IP from Ubisoft, Endwar. When it comes to console RTS’s, it’s all about controls. Command & Conquer has done a decent job of making it’s controls work for the console, but has the problem that the controls still feel too complex, but without the reward of PC precision.

Tom Clancy’s Endwar went the exact opposite direction, opting for a radical new voice command system, allowing you to control your units “at the speed of thought”. Whilst the voice command system is very good, the gameplay suffers terribly to accommodate the controls, making game feel a little like an HD version of Rock, Paper, Scissors.

The people from Ensemble Studios are not idiots and they are very good at proving as much. Whilst their PC games were deep and technical, they have made it clear that from the first mission that they completely understood that a console game would never be the same, and so they aimed at creating a game that would work on a controller.

It seems to be inevitable that a console RTS would never be able to manage the same depth as a PC RTS in terms of it’s control systems, and so Ensemble have also opted to dumb down the complexity of the gameplay somewhat.

At first it felt like there was just too little to work with in the game. The tutorials finished and I felt like there should surely be more to it than this. Some of the main things that got to me initially was that I couldn’t add or subtract individual units to or from a selection, or the inability to create groups that I could easily switch to.

You are given the ability to only stick to basic commands. There are no such things as waypoints, attack moves or formations. You can give units the command to move, attack or use a secondary ability, with each unit having one, but only one. Other basic controls give you the ability to select all units on screen, or all of the units on the map. You can also hold down the A button, which opens up a circular brush around your cursor and allows you to “paint” over any units that you wish to select, while double tapping “A” on a unit will select all units of that type.

The game also keeps it’s own tabs on which groups of units are all in the same vicinity of each other. As I said earlier, you are not able to create your own groups. But if you use the games function of switching between groups, it will decide which units are close enough together to be considered a group, and it will scroll through them.

In fact, after a while I realised that Ensemble have put a lot of effort into trying to get the units, and even the controls to think for themselves, making your life that little bit simpler. It can get frustrating at times, but on the whole, I think that the controls work for console and in a way that anyone will be able to learn and use in a very short amount of time.

Yes, the gameplay is a little simpler than usual because of it, but don’t think that hardcore fans won’t become ridiculously adept at micro-managing their armies and ripping your forces to shreds in online games.

Continued on Page 3

Last Updated: February 23, 2009