Review: Halo Wars (360)

The game's campaign mode takes place roughly thirty years before events chronicled in Halo: Combat Evolved, depicting some of humanity's earliest battles with the Covenant. The story is told through very pretty cutscenes between each mission; pleasantly, it actually makes sense, is decently written, and features pretty good voice acting.  If you're a fan of the franchise, you'll appreciate just how well done the story is. If you are a big fan of the franchise (as in, you own all the special editions, have read all the books, and have bought more than one t-shirt), some of the retcons may make you pause for a second; however, for the most part, it keeps true to the established storyline.

Most traditional PC realtime strategy games that are ported to consoles suffer from control issues, having been designed for use with the keyboard and mouse, rather than the limited input of a control pad. In creating Halo Wars, Ensemble have designed the game around the limited interface the pad offers. What this means is that Halo Wars is more of an immediate action RTS, rather than about micro-managing. There's no searching for mines of Tiberium, or massively diverging research trees for your weapons. You can’t even choose where to build bases; they're restricted to predetermined locations, and everything else comes from there. You can only build so many buildings, and the only form of resource gathering is making sure you have at least one supply pad which will keep giving you resources in order to build your army. Research is facilitated by having enough power from your reactor; troops come from barracks, vehicles from the vehicle depot, and so forth. All upgrades are handled at the base. While this may seemed limited to a RTS veteran, it's enough to get the job done without the controls getting overly complex.

Although limited, the controls do handle very well. Moving troops around the map is easy, whether you're sending your entire force in, or just a selection of them while the rest hang back. The only real issue with the controls comes up when you want to send more than one group out at a time. The pad lets you select either all your units, the units that currently appear on screen, or, by holding down the A button, painting a certain number of your troops with the blue overlay, then ordering them away from the rest. While the former selections are fine for that final charge on the enemy stronghold, when you have to think tactically, and need to flank a position from two sides, it can be slightly annoying because there's no real way to assign your forces to a specific group and keep them assigned. You'll most likely accidentally send all your troops in to one specific point when you only want a certain number to go, and separating them again can be a bit of a pain. Luckily, for the most part, the campaign missions read from the 'build troops, send them out, build more troops when the others die' book of warfare (not unlike the game's Skirmish mode), though there are a few that require proper tactics.

This is where the excellent co-op campaign comes in, as all fifteen single player missions can be played with a friend on Xbox Live, and for the tougher missions, this make things more manageable. Each player is responsible for building their own units, but they share resources, so proper team work is required to make sure you're building the units for your role, as you aren't able to transfer them to your partner (as far as we could see, anyway). Couple that with the classic Halo difficulty levels and you've got co-op fun all round. This team work also transfers to the multiplayer mode of the game, and while it is possible to play one-on-one matches, it's simply more fun to play with a team of up to three players against another team, building your main assault force while your buddy builds the artillery and anti-air forces for the inevitable air strike. It's fast paced and a hell of a lot of fun.

However, this probably wouldn't matter as much if the game didn't look, sound and feel like a Halo game, and it manages to pull that off as well. All the signature designs of the series are there, from the rugged shape of a Warthog to the shade of green on a Spartan's armour; as well as the contrasting smooth, quasi-organic nature of the Covenant forces and the disgusting fully organic nature of the Flood (yes they're there too; we know, just deal with it). It all looks very pretty running at sixty frames per second with barely a hint of slowdown, though it would be nice if the camera could zoom in up close so you could admire the visuals a bit more. The sound effects have been pulled right out of the other games, including the high pitched shrieks of pain as you run over a Grunt. Couple that with a musical score which, while not composed by Marty O'Donnell himself, could definitely have been pulled off by a clone.

Halo Wars proves that an RTS can be done on a console, as long as it's built around the pad and not forced to fit it. There are a few minor niggles, such as the length of the campaign (6-8 hours on normal) and complete lack of a Covenant/Flood campaigns, but it's certainly a lot better than the cynics at Gamestyle Towers were expecting.

Rating: 8 / 10

Words by Garry Webber