The Warring States of NPF - Halo Wars: Now with level selection! [Possible spoilers?]

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Since the game is officially launched in a variety of different timezones, I felt the need to give it a little review treatment since its the only game I've had time to play before everybody else on the planet has played it, liked it, forgotten about it, rediscovered it, decided it sucked ass, saw a remake of it, shunned the remake, and made forum jabs about it in every thread from President's Speech to Avatars RP.

Oh right, I said something about reviewing it.

Preface

Let me begin by saying Halo sucks. Okay, that was overly objective of me, I don't like Halo, I never have. I do like sci-fi settings, so I have a little respect for the relatively expanded universe Halo has created. The games, made enormously popular by hordes of rabid 14 year olds and supporters of Gamer Power Fusion, are among the blandest, most overhyped imaginable.

The saving grace of the Halo trilogy, to me, was Halo 2, which I found had a slightly more compelling story to it. The gameplay of all three, Halo-3-Hornet-Duelling-Scarab aside, is about as lukewarm as it gets for a first person shooter.

Okay, OKAY! Halo has some good multiplayer capacities. There, I said it, that's probably why it's 'great' and blah blah blah.

What does this preface have to do with Halo Wars? Nothing really, but hopefully it gives you all some perspective on the kind of bias I had when picking up Halo Wars. Onwards!

Single Player Experiences

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You assume the role of Captain Cutter, commanding officer of the Spirit of Fire, and aid Commander Shepard.....uh, I mean Sergeant FORGE (pictured above), in an epic romp with the Covenant.

The campaign consists of 15 missions, some short, some medium length. Ultimately, your total play time for the campaign will be directly proportional to the difficulty setting you play on. I was able to burn through Easy mode in 10 hours, and that was taking my time to complete optional objectives. Now that I'm playing through Heroic, it's slower, but not because there's a whole library of missions. So, the campaign is short.

Without going into 'deeper' story details, I will simply say I included quotations around deeper because that's probably what the story is NOT. I liken it to a cliche action story. The characters each fill a stereotypical role, including but not limited to fundamentalist bad guys (pictured above!), gruff male officers, witty gruff protagonists (pictured slightly below above), and know-it-all, patently non-scientific scientists. In other words, fans of the Halo series will not be disappointed! While not bad and certainly not a burden to the game, the story doesn't make it shine either.

Aesthetically, the game is very well put together. Gameplay graphics take the bronze. The textures of units range from decent to great. Particle effects and explosions look great, and unit/structure damage is very nice. The music provides a suitable backdrop to the game, never standing out but never getting annoying. Sound effects are excellent, including some of the entertaining phrases you catch infantry muttering.

If Halo Wars does win on anything, it's the mission cutscenes. These things are beautiful. I felt like I was watching a steroidal Final Fantasy Spirits Within, except the cutscenes did have something to do with the Halo universe.

Now the more important aspect, gameplay. It's good! Okay, maybe that didn't require an exclamation mark, but you know, it's Halo. It's also a console RTS. Halo Wars contributes nothing new to the RTS genre as a whole, but it's a giant leap ahead for the console RTS genre. Here's looking at you, shitty Command and Conquer ports. Controls have obviously been built from the ground up for the Xbox 360, which is the main contributor of the game's fun level. So, the controls are excellent, but they are not without some flaws. For instance, I found it difficult to really micro-manage unit select. If I had a massive army of infantry, tanks, and air units, I would be able to select all of ONE type, the radial selector amount, or ALL of them. True micro-management would have meant I could easily select, say, all the infantry and tanks, but exclude the air units. This might sound like a small jab, but such things come in handy when you're too lazy/slow to be issuing multiple commands while panning around the map, or if just sending all the units in would mean the certain death of a particular type. Did that make any sense? It wasn't supposed to really.

There aren't an incredible amount of units or upgrades in the game, but it's more than enough to be fun. The Leader Powers are great to toy around with, and little is more satisfying than unleashing four MAC rounds on an incoming enemy Scarab. The rock-paper-scissors unit system combined with the variety of anti-unit units makes for a good number of play styles.

What some may consider a flaw, but which I consider a nice design decision, is the lack of micro-management in bases. If anyone's played Battle for Middle Earth, it is essentially that, but with Halo skins. I like that, because I like my action to be with the clashing armies.

There are some glitches here and there. Units do occasionally get stuck on each other, or are otherwise 'stupid.' I also experienced some framerate issues (even with install to hard drive) during times of extreme action (20 vs. 20 units + explosions).

The single player game allows for a plethora of grinding, including an achievement for total completion (15 missions * 4 difficulties * 2 co-op + replays to recover skulls and black boxes). For most, this will get boring before long. So what's left? Without any known DLCs, which will most definitely cost money anyway, there's only multiplayer!

Multiplayer Experiences

...Are rather brief right now. As of this writing, there were only 2000 people online, and I didn't have time to skirmish. But there are a good number of levels available, six different Leaders each with their own powers, bonuses, and units, and up to 3v3 multiplayer which is a nice round amount. It's fun, but will it hold out together?

Wait, why are you asking me? You think I have enough free time to review single player and multiplayer? I'm afraid you'll have to wait for the weekend to get anything more out of me!

Final Azisien Consensus: Rent or Buy.

Reasons to Rent: Because. If you're not sure you'll get much play time out of it. It's way cheaper. Halo sucks.

Reasons to Buy: You like Halo. You like RTS and your PC is broken. You respect Ensemble Studios work over the years and you're kinda weird like that. You want to skirmish Azisien on XBL and kick his jerk Canadian ass. Wait, you could do that with Rent too.

...Oh, I figured this could be the general 'Halo Wars' thread too, if there was to be one.