by gSathe
Halo Wars does a lot of things right, and quite a few things wrong too. There were a lot of expectations riding on the game – heir to the Halo legacy, the swan song of Ensemble, and with any luck, the game which could turn the RTS into console territory. It doesn’t quite manage to live up to those expectations, though Ensemble deserves credit for a good effort nonetheless.
Halo Wars is a well made game. There’s a good story (which left me wishing there was more), the game looks and sounds great, and everything happens with an enviable fluidity. There are fantastic cut scenes and the gameplay is great, and beautifully balanced; all of which one is permitted to take for granted, considering who made the game.
But the one thing which will decide the game is the controls, and though the game was supposedly built from the ground up to work around the console controls, it lacks the smoothness of playing such games on the PC. The controls resemble those of Red Alert 3 on the console, but offer a great more simplicity, however, it still isn’t enough for someone who is a regular in the RTS genre. The complexity of an RTS game comes from its mechanics, not its control scheme, and if you have to juggle between button combinations and twiddling multiple sticks to do something as simple as move troop A from point X to point Y to attack unit B, you’ve got a bit of a problem on your hands.
The game’s base building system offers up a simplified vision of resource management - Halo Wars uses a modular base mechanic that limits the number of buildings you can construct on a single platform. The game’s resource-gathering system makes this limitation especially crucial: The bulk of your supplies come from special buildings that pipe them in, slowing over time.
If resource collection, and therefore base-building, is a slow and slightly tedious operation, combat is fluid, beautiful, and over too fast. Different units have different roles and a lot of player activated abilities, but the control system’s weaknesses come around again to frustrate your best efforts, and you’ll end up tap tap tapping your units to fire in one direction, in an effort to eliminate the opposition as quickly as possible.
Other downsides include camera issues, though that’s not very common, and a very simple tech tree. Seasoned RTS players would probably have more than a few issues with this game, from the control system to the tech tree to the somewhat mixed up gameplay. So clearly, this game can’t claim to have had the same effect as the Halo FPS did for consoles.
On the other hand, the game offers a lot of fun (after the painful beginning, when you absorb the controls) and no console game feels as fluid yet. Whether there is any scope for improvement is hard to say – with the controllers the way they are now, it’s hard to see how the genre can make it to the console. And fans of the Halo universe should give the game a try, or at least download the demo to see if they can’t get a hang of the controls, because if they can, it’s a fun chance to immerse yourself in the universe again.
The fnal verdict then? The game is flawed, but only in terms of the controls. So download a demo, and try it out for yourself, because if you think the controls are okay, then you’re going to have a lot of fun with it.
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