Also available on Xbox 360 and Windows As far games go, Halo Wars is the earliest point in the Halo timeline. If you've read the novels, it takes place a few years after first contact with the Covenant and the glassing of Harvest. Unlike most of the Halo series, Halo Wars is a real time strategy game. You control a group of UNSC marines and a base to create more units to achieve your objectives. As such, the action may be very different from what Halo veterans are used to, but the story and characters feel very much at home in the Halo universe. The last two images are pretty heavily compressed, so in-game visuals are better than what those screenshots suggest. Five years into the Human-Covenant War, the UNSC Spirit of Fire is sent to Harvest to investigate Covenant activity on the surface. Harvest had been retaken from the Covenant, but after the initial brutal assault on the planet, it's unclear what could possibly interest anyone. What the UNSC forces discover, however, is that the Covenant have found something of great value, and a new battle on Harvest begins. If you've only played the main series games, then this may leave you feeling a little out of place as this game takes place over 20 years before the destruction of Reach and the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Halo Wars was, in opinion, an impressive achievement when it initially released in 2009. RTS games had never really worked super well on consoles outside of a few well-done instances, but Halo Wars absolutely nailed it. It obviously feels more natural on PC, but no RTS had ever felt that natural and comfortable on a console with a traditional control up to that point. For the most part, the Xbox One definitive edition is basically just a little more polish on the Xbox 360 original. The levels are the same, the difficulty is the same; it just looks and runs a little better. That visual polish is fantastic, though; the original game looked great already, but the definitive edition on Xbox One looks phenomenal. I understand that not all Halo fans are going to be intrigued by the idea of playing an RTS game, but if you're a Halo fan because of the games' stories and world-building (which is, in my opinion, the best part of the series), then you absolutely owe it to yourself to play Halo Wars. Before this, we'd never gotten a view of the Human-Covenant War prior to the Battle of Reach, and by that point, the war - which lasted over twenty years - was already in its last months. Halo Wars is a fantastic look at the UNSC in the early years of the war when there were still dozens of Spartans and precious few victories against the Covenant. If Halo isn't your cup of tea but you like RTS games, then this is still worth taking for a spin as you'll be hard-pressed to find many better RTS games on console. My Rating - A |
I'm a teacher.And I like to play video games. I like to collect video games. I like to talk about video games, and I like to write about video games. During the day, I teach high school history; during the night, I spend my spare time gaming. Then I write about it. Archives
April 2024
|