Halo Wars Review [review]

The designs of many video games feel like simple extensions of the games we used to play as children. I’m not talking about board or card games, though those are fairly well represented in the digital realm. I’m talking about things like shooters, which are just extensions of the fake war games we used to play. You know, “pew pew, I shot you, you’re dead, no I shot you first!” All boys played “guns” at one point or another, which is undoubtedly where I learned my elite grenade spamming skills.

Real-time strategies also always reminded me of games we used to play as young boys. But usually when we played army men with our toys, it was with G.I. Joe, or Star Wars action figures or some unholy combination of the two. As long as the scale was correct, no one minded mixing the universes as we built huge battlefields on patches of dirt in our back yards, and had our toys fight to the death.

Since that’s what RTS’s have always felt like to me, Halo Wars feels like the ultimate backyard battle with my friends, provided we had action figure versions of every last vehicle and character in the Halo universe. Since that’s somewhat impossible, we have a video game to realize our adolescent dreams. One heck of a video game, I might add.

Gamers have been waiting a long time for a real time strategy on a console to get it truly right. I can say with some confidence, that Halo Wars is that game. The controls have always been the issue and in Halo Wars they are perfect. Navigating the map, building buildings and units, commanding your troops in the field; it’s all so easy, and yet allows you to do almost anything you need to do, that you’ll often be surprised that your hands are touching a gamepad and not a mouse and keyboard. The game is designed to make it easy for RTS newbs, yet it doesn’t back off from its core ideal: to be an awesome RTS, plain and simple.

Plenty of hard-core strategy fans are surely foaming at the mouth at what I just wrote. But it doesn’t have hotkey grouping! The tech tree is rather shallow! There’s no waypoint system! Let me say this in the kindest way possible: shut the hell up. You may have certain expectations of the genre if you’ve ever played another game like it on the PC. But seriously, let go of your expectations and accept what they’ve done here.

Halo Wars is easy; choose all your units in the world (useful when you’re throwing your all against an enemy base), only the ones you can see on screen, or hold down “A” for a paintbrush style tool. Either way, they all work in really intuitive ways. Second, isn’t not having to find a place to fit your factories and resource gatherers nice? Base building is reduced to a single, multi-unit space, often augmented by other spots on the maps to build secondary bases. Seriously, I’ve never felt less intimidated building a second base in an RTS, and that’s a good thing. That’s an awesome thing.

Halo Wars is the RTS genre stripped down to its roots. But it still has complexity. It still has a tech tree, and balances your ability to strategize production and warfare in the appropriate equation. In essence, it’s good, but some will find it bad. Or rather, less that good. To each his own, I say. The people you really need to worry about are hardcore Halo fans.

What about them? What if you’re one of those countless Halo fans who only plays the game on multiplayer and not the single player campaign? What if you’ve never played an RTS, have no idea what one is, and only bought the game because of the word “Halo” on the front? To you I say, you’re gonna love the cutscenes. But seriously, I think you might love the game too if you only give it a chance.

Because if you are a Halo fan, Halo Wars is essential. The aforementioned cut-scenes are nothing short of awesome, putting previous efforts in Halo to shame. Even though it takes place years before the events of the original Halo: Combat Evolved, the action in Halo Wars fleshes out a lot of the story, while being awesomely conceived in its own right. The story only gets richer. But the in-between, the actual game, is not to be missed.
What about them? What if you’re one of those countless Halo fans who only plays the game on multiplayer and not the single player campaign? What if you’ve never played an RTS, have no idea what one is, and only bought the game because of the word “Halo” on the front? To you I say, you’re gonna love the cutscenes. But seriously, I think you might love the game too if you only give it a chance.


Because if you are a Halo fan, Halo Wars is essential. The aforementioned cut-scenes are nothing short of awesome, putting previous efforts in Halo to shame. Even though it takes place years before the events of the original Halo: Combat Evolved, the action in Halo Wars fleshes out a lot of the story, while being awesomely conceived in its own right. The story only gets richer. But the in-between, the actual game, is not to be missed.