Video Games Today

The Halo Wars demo has hit the XBL Marketplace and we have our demo impressions for you. Halo Wars was developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft Game Studios. The game is a Xbox 360 exclusive title and releases March 3rd in North America. Hit the jump for my impressions.



The demo gives you the opportunity to play 2 missions in the human campaign, and play unlimited amounts of 1v1 skirmish matches versus the computer. I'll start off with the campaign. Your army is on the UNSC ship the Spirit of Fire orbiting the planet Harvest. Your first mission is a basic tutorial on how to move around and fight. You are then given a hero unit and you set off on the missions. The missions are nothing to scream about, the main part of this demo is the skirmish mode.

Skirmish mode allows you to play as both the covenant and the UNSC, but you must use the preselected leader. For the covenant you can be the Prophet of Regret and for the UNSC you can be the Captain of the Spirit of Fire. Each leader (Six total in retail game; 3 UNSC/ 3 Covenant) has unique units, bonuses, powers, upgrades, perks, etc. to help define their play style. The Captain can use an orbital "sniper bomb" known as the MAC Bomb. With the MAC bomb you pinpoint an area and deal major damage in that small Area of Effect. The Prophet of Regret can use his power to destroy enemies quickly. The prophet, who is a decent fighter/defender early game, can call down a "holy beam" for 10 resources a second to nearly "insta-kill" and units found under it. He also has the unique Honor Elite Guards. These are basically Elites equipped with only energy swords and can cloak to sneak around. From what I tested they are only good to make an early rush with or defend from an early rush. Once the opposing side has middle tier units they are useless, except to be canon fodder.

The demo does not include all units or all of the tech tree so it is hard to estimate how deep this game will be, but from the demo it looks deep enough to keep you interested but will look like a flat experience to hardened PC RTS fans. Another issue is the controls. Many sites have critically acclaimed the controls, but I beg to differ. Sure, the controls work for a console, but there are many useless things maped to buttons that could be used better off. For example, you can use the right trigger to jump between bases and when you pass one and want to go back, you'd click the left trigger...right? Wrong. The left trigger is used to increase scroll speed accross the map. Sure, the increased speed is nice, but could have been implemented much better. They could have just made the scoll speed gradually increase as you scroll, for larger maps.

Overall, Halo Wars looks like a step in the right direction for a console RTS, but it is not the final step. Future console RTS should use Halo Wars as a model, but expand on it. Think of Halo Wars as the skeleton, we just need to add the muscle to it now. Also, after playing EndWar, lack of voice commands seems like a step backwards for a console RTS. I would have really liked to see Ensemble add an option for voice commands for tedious controls, that would free up the controller even more for a deeper experience.

Enjoy!
The VGToday Crew