Consoles and real time strategy games have historically had a lot of trouble meshing, usually due to the large number of commands required in the game compared to the limited number of buttons on a control pad. Several console games in recent times have made steps towards closing that gap – sadly, Halo Wars is not one of them.

It’s not just the limited control options that hold Halo Wars back, however. Rather, it’s the game’s short campaign, limited multiplayer options and relatively simplistic design, a surprise from genre stalwart Ensemble Studios, which prove to be the game’s undoing – an unfortunate final note in their otherwise stellar career.

Halo Wars is set roughly 20 years before the events of the first Halo game. The game begins on the colony of Harvest, the first planet to be attacked by the Covenant, where the two forces have been locked in conflict for around six years. Leading the UNSC forces planet-side on Harvest is Sgt. John Forge, who has been sent down to the surface to investigate Covenant activity. Forge’s group, assisted by Professor Anders and the AI construct Serina, discover a plot by the Covenant Arbiter to use a Forerunner super-weapon to the UNSC forces. High quality pre-rendered CG sequences book-end each mission and push the story along.


Two tutorials are available to introduce players to the finer points of Halo Wars before the campaign gets underway, but players will find themselves still asking questions after taking the training, since it neglects to share some of the finer points of the game’s control (like unit type selection within groups). What you discover relatively quickly is that your control over the battlefield is quite limited, particularly when it comes to factors like selecting units; you can select units within a radius by holding A, all units on the screen with RB, or all units on the field with LB. You can’t assign teams of mixed units for quick selection; the best you can do is select all units on the screen and scroll between types with the right trigger. Almost all map scrolling is done on the main screen – it’s not possible to simply jump to a point by clicking on the mini-map, though you can jump between bases with the D-Pad, or make the map scroll faster by holding the left trigger. It seems like Ensemble has forgotten important facets of the battlefield and wasted buttons on the controller, for example why not let players jump to locations on the map, and use the D-Pad for designating mixed unit groups? These are the sorts of things that will frustrate anyone who has played a real time strategy game before, regardless of skill level.

Bases in Halo Wars are comprised of a central pod with several spaces for additional buildings which can be increased twice with upgrades. Supply crates are the game’s central resource, collected either on the field by soldiers, or generated by the Supply Pad building. The tech level, tied to your reactors, governs the units, buildings and upgrades you can decide to create. UNSC and Covenant bases work on the same principals, but have minor differences like the number of defensive structures and shields. The main problem with building bases and armies in Halo Wars is that it takes a long time and a lot of resources to get everything up to scratch. The rate of resource collection is really slow, even after you upgrade your supply pads.


Part of the appeal of a real time strategy game for Halo fans is being able to control massive numbers of your favourite units. Ensemble has stuck fairly closely to the unit types which have already been established in existing Halo games, which makes for a fairly limited selection when compared to most real time strategy games. The game works on a rock-paper-scissors principle, where infantry units are best against aerial units, ground vehicles are best against infantry, and aerial units are most effective against ground vehicles. Each side has units which cover all of your offensive needs – standard grunt soldiers (Marines, Grunts), heavy soldiers (Spartans, Elites), scout vehicles (Warthogs, Ghosts), air units (Hornets, Banshees), powerful tanks (Scorpions, Wraiths) and the super unit which one spends far too long researching (Vultures, Scarabs) .The UNSC’s strength lay in its vehicles, while the Covenant has a larger variety of infantry. The vast majority of units have a primary and secondary attack; for instance, marines will unleashed a bevy of grenades when one presses the Y button, while the Warthogs will initiate a hit-and-run attack on your selected target.

Each side has one of three leader units with its own special abilities. The UNSC leaders Forge, Anders and Cutter each have a leader power, a unique unit and upgrade and a special economic advantage. The Covenant leaders Regret, Arbiter and the Brute Chieftain have a unique unit and a set of three combat upgrades and three special upgrades. Selecting a leader is only relevant in skirmish and multiplayer battles, as in the single player campaign you can only control Forge, but have the added advantage of access to all of the UNSC’s special weapons (in the later missions, anyway).


Halo Wars has a painfully small population cap (some units take up multiple slots, too), and tries to compensate for it with a fairly comprehensive upgrades system. Almost every unit on the field and structure in your base can be upgraded somehow; marines can gain rocket launchers, an extra man, a medic unit and the ability to move faster, while supply pads and reactors can gain the ability to produce resources faster and raise the tech level without the need to occupy a second building spot. Upgrades are the key to unlocking your more powerful units like Spartans, Scarabs and Vultures, and upgrading your chosen leader’s special ability. There are also global upgrades to reduce unit build times, for example. The process of building units can be distinctly annoying due to each base having one global rally point – dozens of vehicles and units will gather in the one place and get stuck due to poor AI pathfinding.

The single player campaign consists of fifteen missions that run for about half an hour each. Missions are fairly evenly split between ones where the player has a base, and others where you’re just provided with a scant number of units to fulfil your objective. Pacing and structure of the campaign is not what you’d expect from a developer that made its name in the genre; the first half-dozen missions of Halo Wars are garbage, but they get profoundly better from there. The payoff for playing the campaign is worth it, as the last mission is excellent (as you gain full access to the best of what the UNSC forces has to offer, including all super weapons), but you have to trudge through a lot of dung to get there. One would think in a game where they are trying to pull casual FPS fans over into an RTS setting that they’d have tried to make the campaign start off a bit stronger. Players can only control the UNSC forces in campaign mode – the Covenant can only be played in multiplayer.


Multiplayer modes will seem a heck of a lot more limited than what Halo fans are used to. On the positive side, the entire campaign is available to be played cooperatively both online and off. Skirmish is the only mode available for multiplayer, and although up to six players are supported (through Xbox Live and system link), players are divided into two separate teams. Players can opt to play a game in Deathmatch mode to considerably speed up the pace of play. It’s nice to be able to play as both the UNSC and Covenant, but it would have benefitted from the option to play as the Flood. Perhaps offering the Flood as a playable race would have corrected some of the game’s balance issues – the Prophet of Regret’s cleansing beam is a bit too powerful, and Arbiter’s cloak ability results in a lot of suicide grunt spamming via the gravlift. I’m curious to know what the approach to balance issues will be with Ensemble now closed, though.

To make up for the short campaign and limited multiplayer modes, Ensemble has treated players to a variety of unlockable content. Taking a note from Bungie’s book in Halo 3, each map has a skull to be discovered, which provides a modifier for skirmish maps. Skulls work in both ways – some will cut down research and build times, while others will nerf the abilities of select units or make your units/structures significantly weaker. Performance in each campaign mission is attached to a medal – unlocking gold medals in each difficulty will unlock parts of a Halo series timeline to give players a bit more background information on the series.


The prerendered CG cutscenes are the best aspect of Halo Wars’ visual presentation, as the in-game graphics seem a bit drab. The units and structures have a reasonably good level of detailed to them, but the environments are a bit plain. Players have fairly limited control over camera zooming – you can get a close look at most of the units, but forget about zooming out to a reasonable distance. Any deficiencies in the visual presentation are made up for in the audio department, with a fantastic soundtrack that manages to stand on its own while maintaining that distinctly Halo vibe.

Halo Wars feels like a game that should have been so much better, considering the heritage of its developer Ensemble Studios, and the fact that it’s part of Microsoft’s flagship gaming franchise. It’s obvious that they’ve designed this game to be approachable for those who haven’t played a real time strategy game before, but the scope just seems too limited for the setting. Poor controls, a limited number of unit types, a low unit cap, gameplay balance issues, a bad campaign pacing and severely limited multiplayer options contribute to making Halo Wars fall far short of expectations. There is a good game in here somewhere, but it’s just not possible to enjoy it for very long.