Halo Wars

Hello all,

Remember me? Yeah, I don’t either. It’s been a while. Well I’m here to talk to you about the Halo Wars demo that hit Xbox Live this week. I’ve been terribly busy in the last month with World of Warcraft. I’ve sort of quit it already. Playing that game less than two months and reaching near end game was weird. I had a ton of fun playing it with a friend however. Enough about me, you want to hear about what I think about Ensemble’s Halo console RTS.

First off, this is the demo. I imagine certain things have been tweaked for release. The CGI seemed to have suffered from compression and loss of quality but that may just be for a lower amount of data to download. This is a beast of a Demo size sitting at 1.4gigs.

The setting for this story takes place in our much beloved Halo lore, 20 years before anything major happened. Many spartans are still around. The myth about them however is that they do not fall in battle, they’re icons. Something similar to a super hero. So by Halo 1, why is there only master chief? Why are all the other spartans MIA? We may find this out through this game. This is just me assuming however. What it comes down to is that, Halo has become, over the years, a pretty decent sci-fi adventure which, up until now, only allowed us to follow one guy’s adventure through it. Now we’ll have a 3rd person omniscient role.

As for the controls, Ensemble seem to have cut it down to some basics. It’s simple enough to actually be managed on a controller. Grouping buttons are simple, attack and alternate too. Unit tracking is nice. If you’ve been playing RTS on a pc for ages though, you may find it hard to let go of your quick keys and so on. Unit building is rather simple too, somewhat command and conquer styled.

So far, I’m impressed. Being a fan of the story, I may just pick this one up. The controls have not shut me off entirely to make me reconsider buying this thing.

Victor Games, impressions