Few game franchises are as immediately recognizable as Bungie’s accidental masterpiece “Halo.”
Now spanning a full trilogy and upcoming expansion, the story of the Master Chief’s battle against the Covenant and the Flood is well-known to anyone who’s held an X-Box controller in the past eight years.
Now the series has made a somewhat awkward turn, producing a prequel as a console exclusive real-time strategy game, “Halo Wars”.
“Halo Wars” takes place twenty years before the events of “Halo: Combat Evolved,” in the first battles of the Covenant War.
Captain James Cutter of the UNSC vessel Spirit of Fire has been tasked with securing the planet Harvest against further Covenant attacks.
Together with Sergeant John Forge and Professor Ellen Anders, he must unravel and foil a Covenant plot to annihilate humanity once and for all.
Pretty standard as far as sci-fi plots go, but it’s functional and competently executed.
The gameplay is a simplified real-time strategy system, using modular base designs and a rock-paper-scissors approach to unit balance.
Strategy, however, takes a backseat through most of the game’s quick and decisive battles. The standard rule of thumb is that whoever brings the most and biggest guns to the fight will emerge the victor.
While players must give some thought to base defense while their main force is exploring and battling across the multitude of maps, it is rarely a complicated affair.
Mostly, all you need to do is point your army in the direction of what you want to kill and they can handle the rest. It’s not a very deep experience.
Furthermore, the game isn’t very long. There’s only one playable faction in the single-player campaign.
The Covenant is playable in multiplayer only and the Flood, which makes an appearance in several missions, is strictly non-playable.
The game’s greatest draw is its beautifully rendered cutscenes between missions. While the interactions between protagonists Sergeant Forge and Professor Anders fall well into a cliché egghead versus tough guy with mild sexual tension type relationship, it’s never looked better. It’s almost worth playing the game to see these scenes rendered in beautiful high definition.
“Halo Wars” makes a valiant effort and gets a lot of stuff right. It’s a shame that Ensemble Studios is no more. This game would definitely benefit from a sequel to fully realize the potential of the material presented.
For now, it looks like “Halo Wars” might be the one and only time players get the chance to have a larger look at the beginning of the fight that the Master Chief finished.
