Hands-On: Halo Wars (360)

Last night, Eric and I sat down with the single-player campaign in Halo Wars for Xbox 360, set to drop in the U.S. on March 3rd. We played through the first three missions (well, at least that’s what we’re allowed to talk about) and watched Harvest get rampaged by Covenant troops. We met the new AI companion and the commanding crew of the Spirit of Fire. And how was it? It was … just OK. Hit the jump for our full rundown.

Unlike other Halo games, this one’s been developed by Ensemble Studios (notable for work on the Age of Empires series, among other real-time strategy titles) and instead of controlling Master Chief, you’re controlling entire portions of the UNSC (including the ubiquitous spartans you know and love). It’s a fairly streamlined real-time strategy game with minimal base building (limited spots on the map only allow so many bases), hot keys for your controller to help with the managing process and restricted troop counts so as not to become unwieldy. And it works, more or less.

After running through the training session (and skipping the advanced tutorial — likely a mistake) we were thrown into the first mission of the game — a relatively basic “build troops and go kill this thing” mission. After a bit of housecleaning work (building our base and fortifying it, training troops — the usual RTS stuff), we were off into the fog of war. Immediately we were faced with a somewhat unwieldy camera. Rather than allowing for a quick view of the entire battlefield (as in, zooming out all the way), Halo Wars employs hot keys for each troop you’re commanding, making it difficult to try and arrange multiple groups of UNSC troops and vehicles to do different things — a problem we encountered three times in a row on the third mission.

Tasked with defending an unending line of civilians trying to escape planet Harvest, we found it increasingly difficult to try and micromanage troops. By the end of the timed mission, we were desperately searching the map for anyone trying to escape while simultaneously rushing back to our evacuation ships in an effort to keep them alive.

If these first few missions are any indication of what’s to come, we’re cautiously suggesting a rental. Though we’ve only talked about the first few missions due to embargo, we’ll have a full review for you by early next week and at that point we can spell out fully whether it’s worth your $60 or not. At this point though, we’re feeling a bit uncertain about Halo‘s ability to adapt into an RTS game.