Unreal Game Review: Halo Wars

That Scarab just got a Killionaire.

I must give Ensemble credit where they’ve earned it. With Halo Wars, they’ve managed to craft the best console RPG I’ve ever played, although that may not be saying much as I still have nightmares about Starcraft 64. Unfortunately, the game’s intuitive controls, diverse units and decent story aren’t quite enough, as Halo Wars as a finished product is really only about a third of a game.

It’s the year twenty-five hundred and something, and humanity is in the middle of a full scale war against the Covenant, the bitchin’ alien race who fights with plasma swords and paints all their vehicles purple. The game takes place about 20 years before the original Halo, and tells the story of a smartass, balls-out Lieutenant (who may or may not turn out to be Master Chief), his cute love interest with a PhD in ancient alien shit, a captain with a mustache and a sarcastic VI hologram who you would punch in the face if it were physically possible.

All of them are trying to stop the Covenant from doing…something. I gathered that the aliens found some badass ancient ships stuck in the ground somewhere and they’re trying to get them fired up to win the war against the humans once and for all.

Normally you’re in charge of Lt. Forge, and tasked with building a base, wiping out nearby enemy forces and/or moving an object/person from point A to point B, all pretty standard RTS stuff.

No, sadly, try as you might, you can’t roll an Elephant.

What Ensemble has done with the control system is what makes the game both playable and enjoyable. The distinct lack of a mouse and keyboard usually makes console RTS games a nightmare, but the controls are actually the best part of the game, surprisingly enough, and once you get the hang of them, you’re zipping around the map in no time. As intuitive as the controls are, I kept mixing up the “local units” and “all units” buttons, so more often than not I kept sending 20 tanks and 10 planes to kill a single roaming grunt, with no way to undo the mistaken order.

Unit diversity is definitely present as well. There are probably triple the number of units we’ve seen in the existing Halo universe, and they all fall into the game’s philosophy of “rock, paper, scissors” combat, where air beats vehicles, vehicles beat infantry and infantry beats air. The USNC has a host of different combat options to choose from, but the way the units are rolled out throughout the game is troubling.

You never quite know what units you’re going to be able to make when you start a mission. A logical progression in most RTS games is you start with the basics, and unlock more advanced units as you go. That happens in Halo Wars for a while, but then you go to the next mission and you’ve lost the awesome unit you just thought you gained. I once spent a mission in the middle of the game repairing buildings and wrecking the Covenant’s shit with these cool mech-trooper guys, but then I was most disappointed when I never saw them again.

And as diverse as the unit selection is, I often found that I would find one unit that seemed to work the best against everything (surface-to-air Wolverines were my weapon of choice), build a screen full of them, then send them marching across the map to wipe out everything in their way.

You’ll find yourself wishing you got to play a mission in first person from time to time.

This is now the part of the review where I’d talk about the Covenant and Flood races, and how their units and gameplay balance out against the USNC, but unfortunately, they’re not playable. This is why I said earlier that Halo Wars is only a third of a game. I beat the USNC campaign mode in just under five hours. I spent $55 on this game. You’ve got to be kidding me.

Now I know that the Covenant is playable online, but I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that Ensemble just ran out of time to craft a single player campaign for them before the studio was shuttered (even though this game has been in the works for eons). Theoretically, the game should have a campaign for both the Covenant AND the Flood (a-la-Starcraft’s three-part opera) and if those were scrapped because of the studio closing that’s a halfway decent excuse, but to release an unfinished game, pretend it’s a full title and price it as such? It’s nothing short of a rip-off. Thank God for Gamestop’s return policy.

I understand that it takes a lot of time and planning to write a storyline for each race, and make sure all the units are balanced and everything else that goes into making a good RTS, but I feel like if they had put the extra work in, this could have been a really great franchise. The gameplay is great, the story is manageable, and it’s a series we all know and love. But unfortunately all we got is a game that is quite literally one of the shortest I’ve ever played, and though those five hours were fun, I got the same thing in the same amount of time from Portal and Braid, and those only cost me fifteen bucks.

I hope that someone continues the great work that was started here. With the right amount of effort, this could be a very accessible RTS to a market that isn’t really into the genre. It’s just a shame that all we get with Halo Wars is a brief taste of what could have been.

 

Refresh my memory, were these planes ever actually even in the game?

And yes, I know when this came out. Better late than never.