The Hawkeye

Issue date: 4/27/09 Section: Freestyle

Real Time Strategy games have always had a home as PC games. There have been many failed attempts at translating the genre to consoles but most have no met success due to the fact that there is no mouse control.

Games like Starcraft are legendary for being a game that is played professionally nearly 10 years after its release. Halo Wars will either be remembered as the first official Halo spinoff or just another failed attempt at a console RTS.

If you're not familiar with RTS games, they basically have you playing god or general sitting in a chair high above the battlefield and controlling several hundred
units.
Halo Wars is no exception because you're controlling tons of tiny Spartans, marines, warthogs, tanks, and lots of units that are new to the series. There are several ways to select your units but none of them ever feel as good as a mouse.

Your basic goal in campaign will be to use your units to accomplish your simple missions. Multiplayer and Skirmish are where you will get your mileage out of this game if you so choose to play it.

You will play against either another human or up to three computer controlled bots with up to two as your allies. It's a lot more fun that the cheesy campaign mode and you can play as the Covenant which is pretty cool.

Multiplayer works just like it did in Halo 3 using nearly identical menus, but it's clean and it works so why bother changing it?

You wouldn't think a game like this would bother with a story but it unfortunately
does. You play as John Forge who is a slightly likable character on a mission
from the ship Spirit of Fire.

Your missions are all so mundane that you honestly won't remember them after the game is over. The story can be summed up really easily as "The Covenant want to take over the planet Harvest for some Forerunner tech, and the Humans have to stop them."

The coolest part about the campaign is the extremely pretty and well done CGI cutscenes. It is basically just a few minutes of eye candy after every mission, but it isn't really enough to make you push through.

Halo Wars may be remembered as something else though. Ensemble Studios are the creators of the Age of Empires series which is basically the very birth of Real time Strategy.

Ensemble was bought by Microsoft and tasked with making Halo Wars. Once the game was finished they were shut down permanently. Halo Wars is their last game ever. It feels like all throughout the game there are little stabs that make the game worse, but it almost seems like they are on purpose due to Ensemble knowing they were about to be shut down.

For instance, you cannot even play as the Flood despite the fact that they are in the game in several different missions. You also cannot play as the Covenant during campaign.

Halo Wars overall just feels like it lacks content. There are skulls and black boxes to find but why bother? After playing
Halo Wars for a day or so you have seen everything it has to offer.

Overall, Halo Wars isn't a "bad" game, it's just, shallow. If you have ever played Age of Empires or Starcraft then this game is just going to feel like a dumbed down RTS for the console gamers who only play games like Halo.

It lacks the depth and strategy that belongs into a Real Time Strategy game. With the maximum unit count being around 40 and all resource gathering being condensed into "supplies" the game will just feel shallow and boring to the seasoned RTS player.

Then again this game was actually meant to be "baby's first RTS" for the fans of Halo. So perhaps they accomplished exactly what they wanted with Halo Wars. All I know is that this isn't the saving grace and first great console RTS game that we were promised.

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