Halo Wars

Amongst the torrent of real-time strategy games that have surged through recently (Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War II, Tom Clancy’s EndWar, World in Conflict: Soviet Assault), Halo Wars seems like the most straight-forward and traditional of the lot. In this case that’s in no way a bad thing, considering that its developers - Ensemble Studios - have re-engineered a franchise to accommodate an entirely different genre. The transition from first person shooter to real-time strategy happens rather smoothly as Halo Wars captures the Halo universe and all the alien-on-marine action you’ve craved, while keeping things as true to the series as humanly (or even _Forerunner_ly) possible.

The game takes place roughly 20 years before the events of the franchise’s first game - Halo: Combat Evolved, in the year 2531. The game starts off with a conflict between the United Nations Space Command and the Covenant (for those of you who are slacking off - the Covenant’s a military alliance of alien races with misled religious zeal) on a colonized human world - Harvest - that’s seen almost six years of bitter conflict between both sides. It’s your job in the game, to help the UNSC discover why the hell the aliens are interested in this unassuming world.

The game starts off with an easy-to-understand and short tutorial that shows you the ropes where controls are concerned; which brings us to the most relevant question concerning console RTS games - do the controls suck? Simply put - no. The controls are simple and intuitively designed; the A button handles all your unit selection needs - hover over a unit using your fixed reticule and tap A to select it, or double tap to select all units of the same time on the screen. Alternately, you can press and hold the A button to drag-select units. To help select all units across the screen, you can tap the left bumper button. Alternately, the right shoulder button lets you select units across the map. A word of warning: pressing either one of these buttons plays an unenthused voice recording that says either “All units” or “Local units”. Keep spamming the keys and you’re sure to drive yourself and those around you insane!

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Getting back to the controls, the X button controls all actions such as move or attack, while the Y button controls special attacks/functions - such as flinging grenades at enemy buildings/vehicles with your infantry, or running over enemy grunts with your Warthog. That’s basically all there is to the controls in Halo Wars - no flashy game mechanics to get a hang of, no eccentric ways to control your army, just straight-forward, intuitive controls that work as a solid base for a good RTS experience.

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Base building is pretty straight forward too - there are predefined places where you can place your headquarters. Placing one gives you access to three building slots around it, each of which can house a barracks, a power plant or a supply depot. To place these structures, simply press and hold the action button with your reticule over the slot to conjure an easy-to-use radial menu with all possible options. You can queue up unit creation or upgrades in the same manner - which is by hovering your reticule over the building that researches/builds the unit in question, hold the action button and pick what you want out of the radial menu.

To gain more slots to lay down buildings, you can either upgrade your headquarters or capture expansions. This allows you to lay down another headquarter, to which you can add more structures such as power-nodes and supply depots. Scrolling through the screen repeatedly can be a real pain using the controller, especially while switching between bases. Thankfully though, Ensemble’s given you the ability to cycle between bases using the down arrow on the D-pad, which can be a real time saver.

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Just like the controls, the resource structure is quite straight forward. The way to collect resources in the game is either finding the scattered supplies sitting around the map, or building more supply depots, which are your only steady source of income. So where economy’s concerned, the game boils down to territorial control in both the single and multiplayer modes. The person with the most resources, and the most units generally wins.

Unit upgrades are a little underwhelming though. Most of them usually focus on one aspect of one kind of unit, making it rather tiresome and time consuming to upgrade each and every unit you wish to bolster your forces with. Strategically, there are a few upgrades that are useful - such as the grenade launcher upgrade for the Warthogs - which tie in pretty well when you wish to build a force for hit and run tactics. Other than that though, the upgrade system doesn’t do much for the gameplay and feels tacked on, since most of them are either pointless or far too weak to make an impact on battle.

In multiplayer bouts too, quantity takes precedent over quality, at least when it comes to upgraded units versus more units. The stronger units though, such as the Covenants Scarabs or the UNSC’s Spartans can be a significant part of an army when used strategically. For instance, the Spartan’s special ability is to capture an enemy vehicle, making them really lethal against the Covenant’s expensive tanks.

As an added disadvantage, most Covenant players usually suffer quite a bit initially, since they lack the experience UNSC players have. Blame this on the fact that you can only play as the UNSC throughout the campaign; so if you wish to give the Covenant a shot in multiplayer, expect to get slaughtered the first few times.

Halo Wars is pretty much a well-rounded package with enough to satiate most RTS fans. It’s well balanced, has an engaging single player campaign (albeit, with its share of frustrating moments), competitive multiplayer, and to top it off, has really good visuals (no framerate issues) and boasts of pretty high production values. If you’re looking for a good RTS on the Xbox 360, Halo Wars certainly fits the bill.