Halo Wars
I bought Halo Wars last Friday and have been playing through the campaign on coop. Personally, I like it. I know that a lot of people don’t like RTSs on the consoles because of the difficulty with the controls but I’ve bought all three Command & Conquer games and now Halo Wars and loved all of them. Command & Conquer 3 did have the worst by far, but once they got the radial interface for Kane’s Wrath there wasn’t any problems. Halo Wars has taken the best of this and improved it even more. There isn’t the dozen of button combinations to perform different tasks. In most cases each button has one job and that’s it.
I think that it has kept the feel of Halo very well. The warthogs move like they do in Halo and everything is as you would expect from a Halo game. There is a few new units but they don’t ruin it and it was necessary as there wasn’t really enough to start with.
The game is a lot simpler than other RTSs, there is only really 9 units for each faction and 6 buildings but I find that the game play is more about the fight between units rather than the overall battle with the enemy. While a lot of strategy is needed to win I find that it is very different to Command & Conquer.
At first I didn’t like the idea of the set number of build slots at each base, although many maps have more base sites if you need them and it just adds to the strategy, you can’t just build loads of supply pads because you need the other buildings as well. You also can’t have a completely varied army with only one base in most situations because you won’t have enough cash.
The multiplayer is fun as well. The matchmaking finds other players quickly and so it only takes a few seconds to get into the game. There are plenty of other base sites on the map so it is easy to expand. Some of them are controlled by rebels, they are easy enough to kill once you have a few units, I think that it is just to stop someone sending out 1 warthog at the beginning to get every single base.
Overall though I think that it a good game and it holds true to the Halo Universe.