On the heels of three mega-successful first-person shooters, the news that the Halo franchise’s next headline gig would be a real-time-strategy (RTS) game was greeted with about as much enthusiasm among gamers as if Master Chief had announced he’d be starring alongside Joan Rivers in a very special episode of “Celebrity Apprentice.”
The console crowd needn’t have gotten their Spartan helmet straps in a knot. In the hands of veteran PC developer Ensemble, Halo Wars is a strong—if somewhat stripped-down—exercise that really immerses itself in the lore of the Halo universe.
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Strategy and ’splosions: Halo Wars stays true to the Halo back catalogue while it brings in the big guns. |
The story is set 20 years before the events of the original Halo, and boils down to an extended game of Chase The Artifact between UNSC forces and the Covenant. (You can’t play as the Covenant in the campaign mode, only in multiplayer skirmish.) Sometimes mission objectives are linear—advance to point X and destroy Covenant base Y—but at other points, you’ll be forced to divide your armies to defend a base or fight a war on multiple fronts. Ensemble has also cleverly catered to the Xbox Live Leaderboard crowd by setting up a medal and skull system that rewards efficient strategy and finishing bonus objectives.
The Ensemble title Halo Wars most echoes is Age of Mythology, with devastating Magnetic Accelerator Cannons standing in for Zeus’ lightning bolt attacks. Fortunately, it’s not really any less satisfying to use a MAC to blast a Covenant airship out of the sky before it can drop enemy units into play.
RTS vets who cut their crank-’n’-rush teeth on Ensemble PC classics like Age of Empires may feel initially like they’ve been on the receiving end of a Covenant needler clip. The control scheme is stripped down further than a Warthog parked in South Central L.A.—in the earliest missions, it’s actually possible to score a gold medal by doing nothing more than hitting the left bumper to select your units and the X or Y button to attack whatever’s in front of you.
Eventually, however, the strategic depth emerges. Success in most RTS games usually comes down to who can crank out the resources fastest, but Halo Wars sticks a chain gun in that concept by strictly limiting the size of your bases. At maximum size, you’ll only have eight pods on which to build things like supply bases and reactors, the two major keys to scaling the build trees to the big beat sticks—uberunits like Spartans, Grizzly tanks and airborne Vultures. In other words, don’t rush your early decision making.
Ensemble’s reward for putting the latest luster on the Halo license was swift and brutal—Microsoft disbanded ’em to bring further project development in-house. Word is that Robot Entertainment, a new shop full of Ensemble vets, will produce downloadable content for Halo Wars. That’s good news—it’ll be fun to see what other corners of the Halo world remain to be explored.
