Halo.  The game that launched the Xbox in to the console world AND made the First Person Shooter acceptable on consoles.  It was the Master Chief versus a never ending supply of aliens, and then mutants, all bent on destroying the human race.  Wow, what a game.  Eventually that game became a series of games (none of which lived up to the original by the way).  And now, this franchise has spawned another child.  It’s called Halo Wars and it’s like no Halo you’ve ever played before.

Halo Wars marks the first time that you could play within the Halo universe and never fire a gun.  That’s because this game is NOT an FPS.  It’s a Real Time Strategy game.  Hear this and hear this well… this game is not like any other Halo game you’ve ever played.  You are not Master Chief, you do not carry a weapon, there is no odd ring shaped planet to destroy.  Instead, you command an army.  You build bases, create armies, then send them around to do your will… or at least to meet the objective given to you by the game.

There’s no doubt that there is room in the world for this type of game.  The opportunity to oversee vast armies and determine their fate will definitely appeal to some.  However, my experience with the game was somewhat less than satisfying.  Of course i knew there wouldn’t be any running or gunning in this game, but the way the game is laid out left a little to be desired.  We were told that this game would be the war before the war.  A prequel to the original games that would entail huge armies and epic battles.  That was not my experience at all.

The game is divided up in to many battles which are anything but epic.  Plant a base, make some troops, complete the objective.  Lather, rinse, repeat.   The maps were surprisingly small and objectives were not hard to reach.  I often found myself being patient and building up resources to create what i thought would be a necessary invasion force, just to find that i could have completed the objective with half the armies that i had taken the time to create.  So on to the next mission, and all those troops and technologies that took all that time to create are going to continue through the struggle.  Right?  Wrong!  Each battle starts you over from square one.  In other words if took the time and resources to upgrade your units to carry RPG’s in mission one you’d have to do it again in mission two.  This got tiresome extremely quickly.

All things accounted for I found this game to be very repetitive and disappointing.  Undersized maps and the constant need to rebuild items that you already built shortened my attention span exponentially.  Though the controls were acceptable, troop movement became labored and inconsistent as your armies grew.  Camera control was a bit less than intuitive, particularly if you tried to split your army up to attack two fronts at the same time.  Cut scenes and other graphics were leap years ahead of any previous Halo games, but that’s to be expected after so much time and a genre change.  If you are a console RTS fan then this game might be worth a try, but it’s probably not worth the effort otherwise.  You could always just trade for it on Goozex or rent it and then put it back on when you are done.

- David Hayes

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