Halo Wars Demo Impressions

Halo Wars is the anticipated console RTS from Ensemble Studios for the Xbox 360. Ensemble is probably best known for their Age of Empires RTS games for the PC and are now attempting to bring the genre to the consoles, which is a difficult task considering the difficulty of bringing the complex control scheme of the mouse and keyboard to a controller.

Well I am glad to say that though it may not be perfect they have done a damn good job from what I saw in the demo and this may possibly the best controlling RTS for the consoles. They made unit selection easy by making the shoulder buttons select screen and select all units so grouping your troops is a breeze, but most importantly they made a pretty damn fun game.

Base building and resource gathering has been dumbed down and combined, your base has a limited number of bay where parts can be added onto and the resource gatherers are just addons that automatically bring in more resources for you. This may put off some players as there is no real strategy to where you put your base (in the story missions the places you could drop a base were pre determined and I haven't had a chance to dive into the skirmish or multi player yet) but this is a good thing as it allows you to focus on the battles.

The battles in this game are rather balanced with some cool environmental add ons such as being able to take cover behind wreckage or using the Covenant's hovering sniper towers to increase your view through the fog of war. Speaking of the fog of war it's very different than what many PC players may be used to as you can see all the terrain through the fog just not the enemy placement allowing you to plot your best course of action but making you still have to be ready for ambush at any point. The units and vehicles have a very Halo vibe to them which if you are a fan of the series is a very good thing.

I was actually pretty surprised to find how much I enjoyed this game considering how much of a PC RTS elitist I am. Will it be replacing StarCraft or Sins of a Solar Empire anytime soon as my go to RTS games? Probably not because I prefer the more complex nature of PC real time games but it will still be an enjoyable romp through the Halo universe and will be a great fleshing out of some more of the pre Halo 1 back story.
-Jeremy