Halo Wars Review

If you told me 10 years ago that the guys who made the awesome Age of Empires II would be making a console-only real-time-strategy game based on a sci-fi shooter, I probably would have at least bitten, if not consumed, my hat at the time. Yet, not only has this come true, but Halo Wars is also Ensemble’s last game; so in addition to be needing to be on par with other RTS titles out on the market, it also carries the burden of being held up to the lofty standards set by Ensemble’s earlier, and most excellent, titles. There’s the whole "make an RTS game that a Halo fan would enjoy" aspect to it as well. While I wouldn’t say that it succeeds on all fronts, it does, for the most part, play and feel like a very newbie-friendly RTS game. 

Put simply, Halo Wars is a very traditional RTS game, streamlined for people who don’t really play RTS games. There’s base building, but it’s on a fixed floorplan, and you can only establish bases on existing base sites. The economy is just based on magical space bucks generated from a specific building type, flowing from unlimited coffers into your production queue. All units have a clear upgrade path with no confusing tech trees. Units have just a single special ability, not an array that you’d have to heavily micromanage. These kinds of decisions are a pretty good way to help ease people to the genre, but it also makes the game feel a bit scaled down from my perspective.

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