Leveling Down

The units look the same, but the control scheme has changed…a good or bad thing?

The day before Halo Wars launched, a friend of mine told me that one of his coworkers was incredibly excited that a new Halo game was coming out. When told that it wasn’t a first person shooter and Master Chief wasn’t involved, the coworker walked away with a sad face. This seems to be a recurring theme around Halo Wars, people are excited for a Halo game but don’t know what to think about it being a real-time strategy game. The fact that RTS games aren’t very popular on consoles and the lack of Master Chief only add to this.

Unlike the general population, I was aware of all these details about Halo Wars and still was really excited about the game. Even though I’m not that good, I’ve always loved RTS games, and I’m a big fan of the Halo universe. Halo Wars was marketed to the gaming press as a RTS game built specifically for consoles, and for the most part it delivers a very fun experience. The campaign is pretty short but like Halo 3 it has been designed to have pretty good replay value. It’s a shame there are so few people playing multiplayer, because the multiplayer matches I’ve played have been very entertaining.

Is Halo Wars worthy of the Halo brand name? I think so. See why after the break. As an added bonus, espion4ge will give his Halo NOT-fan second thoughts as well!

The Good
- control scheme makes game easily accessible to newer players but is sufficient for advanced players
- level designs in campaign provide a variety of interesting mission types
- multiplayer matches are a lot of fun

The Bad
- unit pathing sometimes seems broken
- single player campaign is too short, no Covenant campaign
- the control scheme sometimes feels too oversimplified

1. Intro
2. Storyline and Premise
3. Gameplay Mechanics
4. Achievement System
5. Final Thoughts

Ensemble Studios was responsible for the Age of Empires RTS series. Unfortunately, Halo Wars was its swan song

Intro
In September of last year, Microsoft announced that it would be closing Ensemble Studios in a cost cutting measure. The last game for the studios would be Halo Wars, a real-time strategy game set in the Halo universe to be released exclusively on the Xbox 360. Ensemble has been a major player in the RTS genre for a long time, being the developer responsible for the popular Age of Empires series. After Halo Wars went gold, Ensemble Studios closed down for good, victims of their own success. It really is pretty tragic, but they were so good at designing real-time strategy games that they never got a chance to focus on any other types of titles. So when Microsoft came around with the axe, Ensemble was cut.

The biggest question about Halo Wars is how well does Ensemble translate a RTS experience to the console? Most console RTS games are ports or remakes of PC titles, so there is always that “I could play this much more efficiently on a PC” feeling. Overall, Ensemble did a pretty good job with the controls, although their PC-roots do come through at times. All in all, I think Halo Wars is pretty well designed, and I wish Ensemble was still around to update some of the kinks. It’s not a defining real time strategy game for the console like Halo was for first person shooters, but it does an admirable job of trying.

The action in Halo Wars rages across a variety of landscapes

Storyline and Premise
Halo Wars’ story is typical Halo fare. My biggest problem with Halo stories is that they’ve always been kind of confusing, and Halo Wars is no exception. I think I’ve always found the cut scenes confusing because they often take place apart from the actual action. For example, in Halo Wars you see some crazy stuff in the cutscenes, but when you regain control, you are nowhere near the “action”. In fact, in some levels it took me a few minutes to even figure out what was going on and where I was.

Halo Wars is set 20 years before the “Halo Event” (Halo: Combat Evolved), and begins on the planet of Reach Harvest, where many battles have been waged between the UNSC and the Covenant. The main characters are Captain Cutter, captain of the Spirit of Fire, a UNSC warship, his second in command Sergeant Forge, and Professor Anders, the token female scientist character. During one of the battles on Reach Harvest they notice the Covenant studying some artifact, which kicks off a chase around the galaxy. The main campaign is spread across 15 missions which vary from snow levels to cities to verdant plains. In the end, the Spirit of Fire discovers the Covenant’s *diabolical* plan and its crew are the only thing preventing humanity from total destruction. Like I said, it’s standard Halo fare. I wish they could have come up with something more clever – it just felt very generic and the end solution is nothing novel. You also don’t get to play as the Covenant, which would have made for a deeper and more fulfilling Blizzard-style campaign. But I guess a game like this is more about the gameplay.

The majority of my time was spent in multiplayer, where you can play as the Covenant too

Gameplay Mechanics
Control Scheme
Ensemble did a good job of designing the control scheme in Halo Wars to be both console and user friendly. The controls are pretty simple, X is attack move, Y is special attack, the d-pad is used for hotkeys (to jump to a base or units), and there are buttons to select all units or all of the units on screen. The controls are designed to ease new people into the real time strategy genre. At first I was pretty frustrated because I thought the controls were too simplistic, but now that I have played a lot of multiplayer matches I can pretty much do everything I would want to do in a RTS game; it was just a matter of relearning simpler controls. I’ve learned to get over not having control groups by using down on the d-pad (which jumps between groups of units), and I’ve gotten pretty fast at going back to the base and queuing units while my armies are engaged.

What helps the control scheme is that the game is designed in a way to accommodate the simpler controls. In the single player campaign, you rarely need to split your units so not having control groups isn’t a problem. In multiplayer, I generally play 2v2 or 3v3 so we split units by team member, but even when I want to split my own personal units I can do it now without too much trouble. The only real beef I have is the fact that you can only attack move. Sometimes if I am trying to execute an early rush I don’t want my units to waste time firing on their way in because I want to go to the back of the base, or if I’m trying to escape my units will slow down because they are firing. Why can’t I just have a simple move command!?

Campaign/Skirmish
The single player campaign is fun despite its brevity, mostly due to the variety in mission types. You are able to play co-op throughout the entire campaign, but both players  share control of the same base and army. This allows one player to focus on controlling the units, while the other player can focus on base management like defense, upgrades, and unit production.

Skirmish is pretty much the same as multiplayer online, but with the option to play with AI opponents. You can play 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3 against AI and even with AI partners. One limitation though is that there is no FFA setting in either offline or online multiplayer.

Multiplayer
I’ve been sinking the majority of my time into multiplayer, which I think could have a lot of longevity. There are two multiplayer game types, standard and deathmatch. Standard is pretty…standard, while deathmatch gives you fully upgraded techs to start but a much smaller food count. You can increase your food count by taking over expansions, so deathmatch games have a very different feel. It’s a nice change of pace but I’ve been mostly playing standard matches.

Standard can be played 1v1, 2v2, or 3v3, and all have proven to be pretty fun. What I enjoy most about multiplayer is that even though there are fewer units and unit types, skirmishes can actually get pretty deep. Halo Wars’ skirmishes feature the counter heavy gameplay that makes real time strategy so fun. Also, since there are less units, hit and run or two front tactics are very powerful, which I find a lot of fun. Since my fingers aren’t naturally that twitchy, the most enjoyable part for me is thinking about the tactics, when to attack, where to attack, and what to build to counter what I’ve seen. What’s interesting is also how the community is evolving, the first week I played I saw a lot of warthog rushes, but now I’m seeing a variety of techniques being used. I’ve had losses to Spartans, Hawks, mixed forces, and a whole host of other strategies which shows the depth of the game. Ensemble did an excellent job of making multiplayer fun and satisfying, so I hope this game has a long tail and people continue to try it out online. It really is a shame that we probably won’t get a patch to tweak some balancing issues, but even Anders’ Hawks can be beaten if you do it right. Halo Wars may not be Starcraft, but its gameplay is fun and addicting and gives me that “I want to talk about games I played last night with my friends” feeling. What more can you ask from a real time strategy game’s gameplay mechanics?

Fan Service
A lot of nice little touches have been added to this game that will be sure to please fans of Halo. From little sound effects to full blown action sequences, a lot of care has been put into making this feel like a Halo game, even though it’s a different genre. A couple of notable nods to fans:

- All the units that you know from the Halo games look and feel the same. Banshees do the same slow turns, Scorpions are still the plodding beasts, and there are wingmen sitting on the Hornets. In addition, the new units fit in quite well, both to gameplay and the overall look and feel of the universe.

- Sound effects are carried over between the games. You’ll hear the characteristic beeping when the Spartans shields are down, lasers fire up with the same gusto, and even the noise from jacking vehicles sounds the same.

- There is one amazing action oriented cut scene that is more than a Halo fanboy could ever want. I watched it 4 times.

A lot of Halo Wars is an homage to the Halo series

Achievement System
The achievements in this game are pretty standard: there are story related achievements, difficulty related achievements, bonus achievements for each mission, and skirmish (multiplayer) achievements. There are also some hidden items to collect, but you don’t really have to go too far out of your way to find them. All of the achievements are pretty easily attainable with some time, except for one achievement that requires you to level up to be a General on Xbox Live (3,200,000 points). There is also an achievement for a 1,000,000 score in campaign but if you play through heroic once and legendary once it’s not too bad.

My biggest problem as I noted in my impressions previously is the bonus objectives are sometimes broken. There is one achievement where you are directed to “protect every Rhino”, which I did, three times, without letting any die, but the achievement still hasn’t unlocked. I wish the exact stipulations were more clear. But I guess that’s kind of nitpicking. Even though the achievement to be a General is going to take too long for me to try, I’m glad it’s there because it really IS an achievement to rank up that high. I love Halo Wars multiplayer, but not that much!

Halo Wars is full of a lot of fun, fast paced action

Final Thoughts
For me, Halo Wars was a bit like a fine wine. It was good at first, but as time passed I began to enjoy it more and more. I think it succeeds on multiple levels, it contains a competent, if not overly deep, campaign, and its multiplayer is shallow enough for new players to dip their feet in. Yet if you keep wading into multiplayer, you find a surprisingly deep experience that becomes even more enjoyable if you have friends to play with. You can win by rushing, you can win after you’ve fended off a rush, and most enjoyably you can yell with/at your friends while you are doing it. Even if you only have one other friend who will pick up this game and play with you, I think it’s definitely worth it. I even forgot to mention before that you can play through campaign on co-op too.

I give the game an A-. When I had only played the single player, I was ready to give the game a B, but the multiplayer definitely pushes up the enjoyment factor and replay value. I was shocked when I unlocked the 24 hours of gameplay achievement two nights ago, I had no idea I had put so many hours into the game. I’m having that much fun.

One more note I’d like to add, if you are someone who isn’t sure about trying out a real-time strategy game, let me assure you that Halo Wars is the game to try. One of my partners is someone who has never played RTS before Halo Wars, but after only a week of play he is confidently controlling his armies and having a great time doing so. So if you’re on the fence, definitely check this game out. It’s a real shame that Ensemble closed, but I think they can be proud of the way they went out: Halo Wars is the last example of Ensemble doing what they do best, making great real time strategy games.

Second Final Thoughts

Like cmfl3x, I also liked Halo Wars a lot. The demo didn’t really hook me in, but after playing through the campaign and now sinking my teeth into the multiplayer, I’m confident saying it’s the best RTS game on the 360 – it just works. I don’t even care much for the Halo universe, but its mechanics as an RTS game are solid and engaged me just because I’m an RTS fan (I’m able to overlook that it’s Halo – the series that makes me fall asleep whenever I play the campaign).

I give the game a B+. While my score isn’t as high as cmfl3x’s, it’s apparent that we both felt that it’s overall a better RTS game than Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 due to its addictive multiplayer. I’m disappointed that there was no Covenant campaign (pretty blatant omission, in my opinion), and it sucks that balance patches aren’t being released (Anders is too imbalanced) because Ensemble Studios was disbanded. With those two features, I would have awarded Halo Wars an A- or even an A. I’m stuck trying to learn Covenant from real multiplayer games, which is a big enough handicap that 2/3 of the online community stick with UNSC. (I wonder if Starcraft 2 will have that similar problem with only the Terran campaign in the first retail version.)

Besides minor control issues, I honestly feel like the game has many similarities to Starcraft. A typical multiplayer game will consist of constant scouting of my opponent, choosing to tech or rush, constantly building units to counter each others’ armies while also trying to expand as much as possible. It’s intense. I think it’s also the only RTS game on the 360 that features 3v3, matchmaking with arranged teams or random teams (just like battle.net), and dedicated stat tracking online through the website. In multiplayer games, you can even ping on the minimap for all your partners to see, which is quite a notable addition that I took for granted with Blizzard’s RTS games. And while I love it as a hardcore RTS player, it’s also simple enough that someone completely new to RTS games can get into it. Resource management and base layout is minimized so that you can focus on scouting, countering, and engaging. If you’re even mildly interested, I suggest giving it a shot. And for RTS fans, it should be a no brainer whether you’re a Halo fan or not.

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