Publisher: Microsoft
Developer: Ensemble Studios
Genre: RTS
Release date: Available now

If you gotta go out, it ought to be with a bang. And that’s just what Ensemble Studios did. In early 2009, after 14 years as a game developer (eight of them as a subsidiary of Microsoft), Ensemble closed its doors. But their last project was Halo Wars, a real-time strategy chapter in the tremendously lucrative Halo shooter series. The fact that it prospered despite starting out with two solid strikes against it speaks volumes for the game and its creators.

Halo Wars takes place twenty years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved. Human forces have finally reclaimed the planet Harvest from aliens known as the Covenant after five long years of fighting. After liberating and rebuilding a military base, UNSC Sgt. John Forge and his troops track some Covenant stragglers to a mysterious alien artifact. Forge prevents the Covenant from destroying the artifact, which leads Forge, Capt. James Cutter and the space carrier Spirit of Fire to the planet Arcadia and the start of a vicious campaign against both the Covenant and a devastating new enemy.

A detailed two-part tutorial leads you straight into the thick of things in Halo Wars‘ opening mission, which helps you to get used to the game’s basic mechanics and strategies. Once your troops secure the base site, a five-slot base is airlifted in and constructed. Resources begin coming in once you build supply pads at your base. These resources are used to build other base structures such as reactors, barracks and vehicle factories, which you queue up using a radial menu that appears when you place crosshairs on the base and press a controller button. Clicking on your barracks allows you to train squads of marines, flamethrower units and Spartans, hero units with special abilities. Once you’ve created your army, pressing the shoulder buttons selects either all of your units in the game or just those that are on the screen. Pointing on a spot on the ground and pushing the X button moves the selected units to that spot. Your forces open fire automatically when fired upon, but you can order them to attack specific targets with one touch of a button. Completing all of your main objectives moves you onward to the next of the game’s 15 single-player missions. Multiplayer options include a skirmish mode in which you and up to two AI partners can do battle with up to three computer-controlled opponents. There’s an online multiplayer component that lets you play as either human or Covenant in one of five game types through Xbox Live or on a LAN. Or you can tackle the single-player campaign in two-player co-op.

Halo Wars starts out in a fairly deep hole. Master Chief, the iconic series hero, is nowhere to be found (mostly because he’s too young to be Master Chief in this timeline). And the RTS genre has not gained a foothold in the console sector, mostly because of control limitations; even die-hard console gamers admit that the PC is the weapon of choice for strategy games such as this. But Ensemble has accepted the challenge and has created a control system that works, despite lacking the flexibility of a mouse and keyboard. Aside from using the shoulder buttons for mass selecting of units, you can cycle through selected units and choose individual squads or vehicles. The familiar drag-select PC mechanic is also emulated in Halo Wars using a dark circle that is summoned by holding down the A button. HUD elements are tucked nicely out of the way, leaving the majority of the screen uncluttered. Camera controls are easy to use, although the zoom function is rudimentary at best. Graphics are impressive at 1080i, especially during the cutscenes, which are effectively enhanced by the excellent music score, the digital sound effects and the good voice acting (the amusingly snarky ship’s AI Serina is a personal favorite). As for the levels themselves, they start out fairly simple to finish, with the first five taking anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes each to complete. But the difficulty curve makes an abrupt right angle upwards in Mission 6, which tasks you with summoning and placing five tanks in various places on the map while defending your base against seemingly endless waves of enemies. From that point onward, you need to use all of the tricks of the trade to survive and progress through the remaining missions.

On the negative side, Halo Wars suffers from the repetitive gameplay that plagues most RTSs. Every level starts with a base that you have to equip, soldiers you have to train and vehicles you have to build. It doesn’t help that your build queues progress consecutively rather than concurrently; if you want to train three squads of marines and three squads of flamethrowers, one set of units won’t start training until the other set is finished. This forces you to wait much longer than necessary for all of your queues to empty before you can put your plans into action, which can be a major problem during the various timed missions. Controlling multiple sets of units is difficult because of the limited control scheme, so you spend most of the game using the tried-and-true Starcraft Zerg rush tactic, sending all of your units in a single force against the enemy. And the single-player story is fragmented to the point where you might forget why you’re doing what you’re doing. On the multiplayer side, the AI won’t put up a decent fight in Skirmish mode unless you switch from the default automatic difficulty setting, and the Trueskill-based online matchmaking system can take a long time to find you an available match, even with thousands of players signed in.

In its final project, Ensemble has tried to finally bring a manageable RTS game to the Xbox 360, and for the most part it has succeeded. Halo Wars features sharp graphics, easy-to-learn controls, and sound effects and music that contribute greatly to the immersiveness of the game. But being forced to build bases and assets at the beginning of each scenario can start to get tedious as the missions progress, with the pace slowed by long build times and the wash-rinse-repeat combat. Halo Wars is a grand experiment that falls just short of the mark.

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