Xbox 360 Game News, Reviews, and Columns - XboxFocus

E3 08: Hands on with Halo Wars

by Dick Ward July 17th 2008 11:42 PM EDT0 Comments

That's right, Xbox Focus' own Dick Ward managed to get in and get his gurbby little mitts on Halo Wars and you'll never believe who else was there. Find out and get Dick's full hands on report after the jump!

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Halo Wars, it's one hell of a big title, and one hell of a change from the traditional Halo gameplay. Halo games are known for fast action and quick intense fights. Real Time Strategy games on the other hand are famous, infamous to some, for their long drawn out sessions and slower, more methodical matches. Banking on Halo players to make the transition could be risky, not to mention that no console RTS has yet managed to prove as popular as it's PC counterpart. For their first ever non PC game Ensemble Studios, the people behind the acclaimed Age of Empires series, are confident that they've done the seemingly impossible and created a real RTS experience for the Xbox 360.

I sat down today with one of the Ensemble Studio's lead desiginers to get a little hands on experience with Halo Wars. He showed off the trailer first, and then began a rapid fire demo covering all the basics so we could get right into some multiplayer battles. The game looks good, of course, but that can be said of nearly any Xbox game coming out next year.

About a minute into the demo I was joined by a few other people who wanted to take a look at the game. Of course, we all took the time to welcome them, shake hands and such, which is when I realized that the suited man towering above me was Reggie. As in Reggie Fils-Aime. As in the president of Nintendo. Apparently he stopped by to get a look at some of the new games. Who knew? After the initial demonstration, I took my seat at one of the kiosks set up to play the game and began a 2 v 2 match consiting of myself and another journalist as the UNSC against a pair of computer controlled Covenant oppornents.

No RTS has ever truly worked on a console, and it all comes down to one thing. It's not that console players don't want the genre of course, it's that so far, every real time strategy game put on a console is nearly unplayable. Before passing judgement on anything else, I'll say that for the purposes of our demo, the controls were perfect.

Selecting troops, by squad for infantry and individually for vehicles and Spartans, is done simply by pressing the A button. To select multiple troops, hold the A button down and a blue circle appears. Move it around and it'll select any unit that it touches. The bumpers make it even simpler, by either selecting all troops on the battlefield or all troops onthe screen. Command a unit or squad to move by hitting X where it needs to go, and attack by hitting X while hovering over an enemy unit.

The D pad offers quick jumps to your units and to your base. Easy, right?

The controls aren't the only thing that Ensemble has simplified for this game. Resource management, which we're seeing less and less of on PC RTS games, has been scaled down to the simplest possible level. The base will generate resources automatically, but adding on builings and destroying enemies helps as well. This takes a huge hassle off of the player, and makes this a very well suited game for the Xbox 360.

After roughly twenty minutes my partner and I had wiped the map clean of Covenant. The match was quick, but the enemies were certainly scaled down so as not to utterly destroy us. I have very little bad to say about this game at the moment, but am still a bit unsure about how battles on a larger scale will handle. Still, with a very easy to understand, but still very deep system of play, and a co-op campaign mode, I've got high hopes.