The first thing you would probably want to know about Halo Wars, is if it will make sense to play the game, if you’ve never played or heard about the Halo series of games? (If you haven’t heard about the Halo franchise, where’ve you been?!?!) Well, good news: The story of Halo Wars plays out a full 20 years before the first game’s story begins, so even for Halo-newbies, the Halo Wars story will be fresh and new.

Not just for the Halo veteran

For old-school Halo, Halo 2 and Halo 3 players, Halo Wars, even though the story plays out *before* the first game, brings a certain amount of nostalgia. Seeing the weapons, characters, vehicles and locations from the First Person Shooter games, in a Real Time Strategy format feels part-surreal, part-disbelief. Great Halo storyline, but in a Real Time Strategy format. That works! Yes, yes and yes, this is one of the very few console-based RTS games that not only has an intuitive and easy-to-remember control scheme, but also the gameplay is slightly simplified for console play.

Fantastic graphics

Graphically, Halo Wars looks fantastic. The story unfolds in beautiful CG animations in between missions, and the gameplay is so rich with colour and stunning backdrops. Each individual unit has such a high attention to detail, Halo veterans will instantly recall each of them. Even smaller units’ weapons of choice are recognisable.

Screenshot courtesy: xbox.com

Musical score that doesn’t bore

The music and sounds in the game are also classic Halo, classical musical score and familiar gunfire and explosions abound. The attention to detail even with the sound is astounding. Offscreen gunfire is softer than onscreen, and fights happening further away, seem even softer. However, as these games go, the sounds can be repetitive, what with it being an RTS, and there being constant gunfire most of the time. The music and the often-humourous chatter between unit make up for this though.

Screenshot courtesy: xbox.com

Simple, yet effective

The game plays out in classic RTS style. It’s not an overly complex game, or gameplay. In fact, it’s been simplified slightly by having specific build-spots for buildings, upgrades of the main command centre creating more build spots. This simplifies the base building at least. Resource gathering has also been replaced by Supply Depots getting a steady stream of resources in. Typical RTS fare is there, collect supplies (resources), different buildings for footsoldiers, vehicles and flying vehicles, upgrades to each of the unit types, build queues, turrets, upgrades to those. Once you’ve played through all 15 of the fantastic, and some, very different missions of the game, you’d do well to move on to play multi-player skirmishes. This is where the game really shows it’s worth. You get to choose one of 6 leaders, each giving a unique bonus/advantage to you during gameplay. Multiplayer is also the only place where you can play as the Covenant, the bad guys in the story.

Great success

All in all though, Halo Wars is a great success. Pulling off a successful RTS game on a console is no small feat, and Ensemble Studios, the makers of classic RTS games such as Age of Empires on the PC, pulled it off admirably. It is very obvious though, why this game sold more than a million copies in less than 3 weeks. It’s just such a pity that we won’t see any more games from that studio, as they’ve been closed down.

Have you played Halo Wars yet? What did you think?