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4.12 out of 5 Jaded Reviews: Halo Wars Five long years. That is the start of a truly amazing gem. In the world of Real-Time Strategy, it has been at home on PCs for almost its entire lifetime. RTS games attempted on a console setup have proven to be ports that never offer an accurate control scheme or simply are done horribly. Halo Wars stepped forward with a unique concept. An RTS designed for a console and not a computer. Would this simplified control setup really make an RTS playable on a console? Would Halo be this game's only selling point? Would I be able to ever get the Ready for Sequel 100% completion Achievement? Halo Wars has an extremely simple control setup as was Ensemble Studio's intent. It was designed to be played with just one analog stick, and the face buttons. You get that concept down, you can play Halo Wars. The simple controls that allow anyone to pick up but require a lot of dedication to successfully master has become a staple of Halo. And it's ideal for putting two unheard of things together. Halo as a Real-Time Strategy game on the Xbox 360 console. Halo: Combat Evoled had originally started out as an RTS for the Mac. And Ensemble nearly perfected that concept for Halo Wars. I say "nearly perfected" because there are a few nit-picking issues but those can be overcome through simple use of skill. A is the main selection button. You use A to select buildings, units, and other objects on the map. B is used to cancel unit construction or deselect buildings and units. X is your action button in Halo Wars, allowing you to move units, attack hostile units, pick up supply crates, garrison map objects, or queue up units and research. Y is a special button that allows your selected unit or units to use their secondary ability. These are similar to Halo's grenade and melee where a unit often has a secondary that allows it to perform outside of its primary role adding a lot more variety. The analog sticks control your camera scroll, rotation, and zoom. The Left Trigger increases the speed your camera moves while the Right Trigger allows you to scroll through all units of the same type within your selection. Left Bumper selects all of your units on the map. Right Bumper selects all of your units visible on your screen. And the Directional Pad is useful for bringing up the Leader Abilities menu, cycling through your bases, cycling through your unit groups, and cycling through alert events. It truly does not get simpler than that for Halo Wars and that is why it works so well. The only downfall is that there is no way to save selected unit groups, double click to select all units of just that time on screen, and no way to change formations, unit behavior, or give advanced orders like stop, guard, or patrol. But what you can do is quite amazing and intuitive. When you first start Halo Wars, you see a title screen asking you to Press Start. Here in the background you can see the original announcement trailer for the game. There's a lot of menus beyond this. Campaign, Skirmish, Tutorial, Multiplayer, Timeline, and Extras. Starting off with Extras, you have DLC, Credits, all your collected statistics for the game, and the options. There's quite a few statistics that Halo Wars tracks after each match or mission. And you can even see some more info online at Ensemble's Halo Wars website. Options allows you to select quite a few features, from camera sensitivity to if you lock onto units when your cursor is over them. To having a standard Friend and Foe color scheme to all the volume settings. Always show unit hitpoints, show unique paint jobs, zoom minimap, default Skirmish difficulty, and even a Skirmish announcer. The Tutorial has a basic tutorial that teaches you about movement, unit selection, unit movement and things like that. Advanced talks more about base building, counters, and essential RTS gameplay mechanics. Very helpful. For the Downloadable Content, Ensemble Studios has shut its doors and became Robot Entertainment. Robot has stated that they will maintain Halo Wars with patches and updates so the game can always be improved. The Timeline is extremely detailed and as you find Black Boxes in the Campaign, you unlock an impressive look into the backstory leading up to Combat Evolved. This timeline, while maybe not canonical, is extremely detailed an worth looking into for any Halo fan. To talk more about the timeline, it gives quite a bit of background detail to where Halo Wars sits in the Halo universe. While there are a few seemingly incorrect notes that can be amended later on with an explanation (or, rather, possibly are more accurate than what we once knew), almost everything is expertly thought out with the same level of detail that Bungie put into their trilogy and Halo Wars even gives respectful nods to the novels where the trilogy avoided intertwining with. The units in Halo Wars also act more like they're described in the novels instead of the FPS trilogy which I love as well. To me, this puts the player in an impressively rich story, and can not only be a good introduction to what's beyond the game in Halo but also will make any true fan of the story giddy with joy. I like Halo Wars story more than I like the trilogy's. It just delves deeper. It truly is the best example of Halo fiction within a video game. I cannot say too much that would spoil the story for people, but I loved every minute of it. Despite the fact that people debate over what is and what is not canon, Ensemble did a great job of making sure what is in Halo Wars is quite possible to exist in the overall Halo universe. There's only one glaring flaw to the story that I'll mention later. Skirmish allows you to verse the AI offline. I'll explain more about the details in the Multiplayer part of this review as they are quite similar. But this is a good practice realm. It offers four AI difficulties mirroring the Halo franchise. Easy, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary. As well as an Automatic setting that scales the AI to how well you do against it. Win often and you will be looking at an opponent that essentially becomes a hacker far beyond the skill of Legendary. The standard four difficulties, though, typically don't increase the AI's ability to out think you. In the campaign at least, your units are more affected by damage. The enemy's units are less affected. And they generally just mass units more. The AI has several tactics for online play like rushing, being economic driven or even completely incompetent. A Legendary AI might be very easy one match and just push you to the brink the very next match because it chose to be more aggressive. This is also dependent on the leader the AI is playing. The Campaign offers solo or two player cooperative play over System Link or Xbox LIVE. Where players share responsibility by transferring units between each other and having shared control over the bases. This actually plays out quite well when you communicate and work together. Especially by having one player work on the economical base building part of the game while the other works on the unit assault part of the game. The Campaign comes with the four aforementioned difficulties and can become quite a challenge. It keeps score of lots of things, similarly to Halo 3's Campaign scoring system, and it will award you Bronze, Silver, or Gold based upon how well you play for each difficulty. Beating a mission with a friend gives you a Buddy Emblem for that mission's selected difficulty. While beating it under par gives you a time emblem for that mission's selected difficulty. There are also hidden Black Boxes which unlock timeline events and Skulls that appear after completing secondary objectives which themselves vary quite a bit from the mission's main goal. Skulls drastically change the game by either buffing your army, adding strange effects, or making the game harder. So there can be quite a bit of replay value just to complete everything for the campaign. The campaign itself has 15 very varied and fun missions. That can take anywhere between 15 minutes to over an hour to complete any given one. There's also a theater to watch all the cutscenes. And the cutscenes in this game are gorgeous and well made. They were made by a studio other than Ensemble but the CGI craftsmanship is top notch. The story conveyed by those alone are worth watching for any Halo fan and will floor you with the truest envisionment of Halo's masterful universe. The campaign's biggest flaw could be the story direction. While Ensemble did a good job of making the story arc work very well for Halo Wars, many fans may feel this game's climatic twist goes against Bungie's own games and the written novels for Halo. Despite the flaws of the story, the characters are very Halo like as one can expect and the many unique elements the missions present are well worth playing through. Making Halo Wars' campaign well worth it. Now for the biggest draw. Multiplayer. There are leaderboards here as well as your service record but also System Link and Xbox LIVE modes. Halo Wars' multiplayer allows you to join or host a public match, which includes matchmaking for the few team sizes and gametypes it has available. Or a private match where you can play with your friends with your own custom settings. And of course there's the Co-op campaign. Halo Wars allows 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 game modes. There is no FFA here. Five 1v1 maps with two DLC 1v1 maps, six 2v2 maps plus one DLC, and three 3v3 maps with one DLC 3v3 map. That's a total of 18. Which is respectable given the scale of this game's matches. There's Standard and Deathmatch game modes with the downloadable Keep Away, Tug of War, and Reinforcement. Standard is the most popular. Where you start with your main base, build up, spread out, and destroy your enemy. The game ends when you killed all enemy bases and if they don't reclaim one within a minute they lose. Or they automatically lose if you kill all their units after their final base. Deathmatch gives you an incredible amount of resources, all research complete, and a small unit cap that does increase with each base you take. It's a straight up brawl where you have everything right from the start and have to go hard against your foe. Keep Away is like Neutral Flag CTF from the trilogy. A Sentinel spawns near the center of the map, you pick it up with one of your units, return it to your base to score. Tug of War plays out by the amount of forces you have. The larger your force, the more hurt your opponent is. You when when you completely fill out your bar and take his away by dominating his army continually. And Reinforcement periodically gives you units based upon your economy, research level, and unit production buildings you have. As such, you can't build your own units save for some unique faction units. And you have to make do with what you're given to overcome your opponent. The two factions you can play as are the United Nations Space Command and the Covenant. Each have three leaders. Captain Cutter, Sergeant Forge, and Professor Anders for the UNSC. The Arbiter, Brute Chieftain, and the Prophet of Regret for the Covenant. The factions themselves have strengths, weaknesses, and a unique gameplay style. The leaders also increase the variety because they have their own unique units and abilities. For instance, Cutter is better suited for infantry rushing, while Forge is very aggressive and power minded, while Anders is very tactfully research and air based. The Covenant leaders are similarly different from each other and can somewhat mimic the UNSC leaders. This adds quite a bit of death and strategy into who you pick to play as and what plans can be laid out to suit strategy. The UNSC leaders get an Ability menu by pressing up on the D-Pad. This allows them to call down abilities available to the UNSC and an ability unique to the leader you've chosen. The Covenant have a few units to balance out some of these abilities like the Engineer's ability to heal units compared to the UNSC's ability to call down a healing area similar in look to the Regenerator in Halo 3. The Covenant's leader actually gets summoned to the battlefield and acts as a controllable unit with his calldown being his Y ability. Also talking about the Abilities menu, when you select a structure a circular menu pops up that allows you to move the left analog stick to what unit you want to train or what you want to research. These are situated in a clocklike fashion between 8 points somewhat similar to how the D-Pad is laid out. That makes using the menus very simple in Halo Wars. Now for the more technical aspects. The game does suffer from framerate and lag at certain points. Particularly with a lot of units or a lot of players in the match. And there are some random but lethal glitches like how the Arbiter teleports across the map or how sometimes units drive out of map boundries and never stop, effectively losing the unit while still taking up the unit cap amount. The Heads Up Display is quite nice, showing your ever growing supply, a mini-map, your technological level, and your unit count. Halo Wars does have a small unit cap. But that emphasizes making the right unit combination choices and micromanagement ability. The Covenant generally has 10 more potential unit points than the UNSC. But depending on the unit, like the Scarab, it may take up quite a bit of that potential unit cap for a small army. Units come in many shapes, sizes, and roles. From weak scouts to juggernaut like tanks and uber units. As well as dedicated anti-infantry roles etc. Despite having simple gameplay design, Halo Wars does offer many options for your unit composition, especially when you take into account the secondary ability most units posses. Units for the most part stick together but using the R Trigger can allow you to control only all Marines or all Wraiths at once when you have your whole army selected. The unit path finding is sometimes quite weak, with your army cluttering amongst themselves and the terrain. Halo Wars has one resource. Supply. Supplies are given to you through UNSC Supply Pads or Covenant Warehouses. These continually give you supply. But capturing points on the map that give you supply or picking up scattered crates can also increase that. Supply is used for all construction and research. This streamlined resource management allows for fast paced gameplay. Tech levels are measured in how many UNSC Reactors a player has or how many Ages the Covenant research. And, of course, by controlling reactors on the map. These allow you to research more advanced technology. Bases are socket based. Certain objects exist in some maps, like a Mega Turret, or Tech Level Reactors, to Guard Towers, and Resource Points. These aren't vital to control but can help you achieve a small victory or win in the long run. Garrisoning infantry into these points gives you an advantage and allows the defenders to be better protected in their stationary position. The extra resources you get from supply points or that extra tech level can win you the game if you play it right. You have a main command center, with building slots around it where you build all of your other structures. Bases can only be built in predetermined locations. Most of these predetermined locations are even controlled by NPC factions that you need to take out in order to claim the slot for yourself. The UNSC and Covenant have slightly different layouts but function pretty much the same. There are also four turret points around the outside of the base to help defend it. This makes base management a little easier than the build anywhere setup of most RTS games. But well placed assaults can be devastating and puts the focus on defending and assaulting on your units. Another thing is that those NPC units sometimes have high veterancy. Up to five stars, even. When units engage in combat and survive, they gain some experience from it. This means that if you conserve your forces and do well, they will become slightly better. Either one, two, or three stars better. A three star unit essentially is as strong as two of itself. Since the legendary Spartans can commandeer vehicles, and look good doing it too, the upgrades for the vehicles, themselves, the veterancy of the vehicle, and veterancy of themselves all stack. So you can gain a very formidable unit by using Spartans. The Graphics are not lacking either. What originally reminded me of Halo 1 in the E3 demonstration has turned into more of Halo 3. While only so much detail can be put into units of such small scale, the terrain just screams with character. From the various locations to the way the animations come together. Everything in this area is top quality and polished. While all units in multiplayer and single player use a generic solid color for every unit to distinguish what units go to which player, I do wish the campaign retained the classic color scheme of Halo that the demonstration video showed. The solid team colors do suffer one flaw. Lack of detail. To show off the color, the lighting effects on the units and the detail is taken away. But that's only for the units and buildings. Everything else is just so impressive to witness. As for the sound, it's unbelievable. The Marines and Grunts say funny things, the Spartans make you feel like they are Spartans, the Elites talk with confidence, the local wildlife makes noises and generates ambiance, the breeze, the sounds of Forerunner bridges. Everything comes together to create a truly immersive experience. The AI adviser and the Campaign's narrative give this game so much credit. The voice overs are almost always very expertly recorded and the lines give a lot of generic but everlasting depth. Cutter sounds like your weary captain, Forge sounds like the insubordinate guy you like, Anders (to me anyway) is a completely arrogant scientist. Serina, the ship's AI and your mission adviser, is a very sarcastic and hilarious character. Regret is completely deluded, the Arbiter is satisfyingly evil. Everything comes together to create the quintessential Halo experience. Let's not forget the Music. While it is not Martin O'Donnell of Halo trilogy fame, the musical score is absolutely outstanding and suits the game's style expertly. I truly was moved by the shift in calm to action as the music shifted to the sounds of battle. It truly is ethereal when experienced all together just like the Halo atmosphere you know and love. So to be closing this excessively winded review. This is the only RTS that I have enjoyed on a console, mainly because it has a control scheme that works. But the story fits into Halo perfectly, the quality of the sound and graphics, along with the presentation, polish, and simple Halo effect makes this a truly amazing game despite it not having as much depth as a PC RTS like Dawn of War or Starcraft. I recommend any Halo fan or RTS buff to pick this game up and anyone else to download the demo from the Xbox LIVE Marketplace. The simplicity yet deepness behind the controls and story, respectively, makes this a must own for fans like myself. You will not be disappointed as long as you keep in mind that the story is for Halo and the gameplay is perfected for a console. |