games: Halo Wars

Halo Wars on the Xbox 360 does a really good job of taking the Halo universe and setting it in a simplified strategy environment. This is a real time strategy game that is more of a “My first RTS” than a natural progression of traditional strategy games.

The game never demands too much sophistication as controls work well and the developers know a console pod isn’t the ideal way of delivering complicated military strategy.

Once you’ve selected a player you can obviously tell them what to do. Move, attack or use a secondary attack. Ranging from basic grenades and flashbombs to ramming vehicles.

Spartans can even take over enemy vehicles, which can be useful when The Covenant start pulling out their heavier machinery.

Compared to Red Alert, there’s nothing much exotic here and not good for people who are used to more hardcore strategy games. PC fans steer clear. If you’re a fan of the Halo aesthetic, these landscapes and cutscenes are perfect.

Despite the fact that there are only 15 missions and they’re all really short, there’s a good variety to your objectives and your environments. But less variety with your tactics – so you might begin to feel like you’re stuck in a rut as you play.

The Halo FPS is all about destroying other people, and if you’re an avid online player then you’ll know that it’s all about calling them other names. The same is true of the multiplayer in Halo Wars. The skirmishes are as vital to the Halo brand as metal helmets and guns and this is where you’ll play as the Covenant, getting to doff in humanity for all time, as represented by some guy on your friends list. Result.

So all in all, Halo Wars is a good (not great), uncomplicated strategy game, with a slightly entertaining story and some nice and cheesy acting. The game will keep Master Chief’s universe ticking over nicely until Bungie decides what exactly to do with it next. 4 stars!

Best of the Rest:

IGN:
Bungie Studios has spent the last decade refining its winning formula for first-person shooter success with the Halo series. The epic sci-fi saga about humanity’s battle for survival against the alien Covenant collective has now spanned three games on Microsoft’s Xbox consoles, and that number will only grow in the years to come.

EuroGamer:
The strange thing about Halo Wars is how understated it all seems. How dignified. There are so many ways that Halo Wars is an important game - it’s real-time strategy on console, it’s Halo in a new genre, it’s Ensemble’s swansong, it’s another blow in the console wars - but while they could easily dominate your thoughts as you play it, they don’t. Instead they just evaporate in the face of such a confident, self-assured and elegantly constructed videogame.

The Telegraph:
It’s a testament to Halo’s tremendous power as a brand that the Halo Wars demo was downloaded from Xbox Live by over two million users within a week of becoming available. After all, the first-person-shooter (FPS) and real-time-strategy (RTS) genres sit at opposite ends of the video game spectrum. Shooters are visceral and immediate with action flying fast and furious at the player, while RTS games are epic slow-burners which prize resource management and tactical vision. The two genres have very little in common and there’s not much overlap in their fanbases. So the decision to base an RTS game on a FPS (or indeed, vice versa) seems, initially at least, to be a fool’s errand.