http://www.oxmonline.com/article/xbox-soapbox/halo-wars?page=0%2C4
Halo Wars
WORDS BY: Ryan McCaffrey
Dave Pottinger Gets The Irony
Once, Halo: Combat Evolved was in the position of trying to prove that a first-person shooter could not only function on a console, but thrive there, too. Now, it’s only fitting that the franchise finds itself in the same spot again, this time with Halo Wars seeking to be the breakthrough real-time strategy title for gamepad-gripping gamers.
And as the game’s lead designer, Pottinger says Ensemble Studios is up to the vaguely familiar challenge.
“We want to do for strategy games on the console what [Halo: CE] did for first-person shooters,” he proclaims.
The veteran RTS developer, renowned in PC circles for its multi-platinum-selling Age of Empires series, is bringing its talents to the console for the first time (and the last, sadly — see sidebar on page 40). But unlike EA’s attempts — which have been frequent and mostly fun, but generally more adapted to the gamepad control scheme than actually designed for it — Ensemble is starting from scratch with Halo Wars. “We don’t have any of the (PC) baggage from the Age series,” says relieved producer Chris Rippy.
Then again, the Halo name brings some baggage of its own. To make it more intense, the team is also being tasked with generating the breakthrough console RTS. But Bungie’s megafranchise — which, in the ultimate irony, was originally conceived as an RTS more than 10 years ago — also gives them an upfront advantage.
“[Being] Halo helps us get a much larger foot in the door,” admits Pottinger.
A bigger one than they can even imagine, as we’re about to find out…
"X" Marks The Spot
We played the first five missions of Halo Wars — a full third of the 15-level campaign — during an afternoon that flew by all too quickly. So how easy is it to get into? Well, for never having developed a console game before, Ensemble sure has nailed the controls. With apologies to the recent Red Alert 3, they’re hands-down the easiest to learn and master of any 360 RTS yet. A short tutorial mission sets the stage for the events to come on the planet Harvest — the Covenant and UNSC are fighting for a relic buried in the ice — and before you know it, you’re building a base, recruiting infantry, and commissioning vehicles.
We’d consider Halo Wars a medium-grade RTS in terms of depth: it lacks custom group slots, for instance, but offers more command and upgrade options than, say, Ubisoft’s voice-powered EndWar. The A button selects a unit, while RB selects all on-screen units and LB snags everybody. X tells them to move or attack, while the Y button triggers a unit’s special attack. The infantry, for example, hurl grenades, while the Warthogs will ram their targets.
A Natural Fit
With goodies like the Warthog in the toybox, the Halo IP lends itself awfully well to an RTS. You’ve got leader units who can buff or upgrade everyone else — plotline power players Captain Cutter, Professor Anders, and Sergeant Forge — while the generic units upgrade as you’d expect. Infantry can graduate to shotguns and later ODSTs, Hornets get rocket-toting gunners straddling their wings, and the Warthog eventually scores a Gauss cannon, to name a few.
And once you amass a large army, singling out the unit type you want is as easy as pressing RT to cycle through the groups, which are always shown on the bottom of the screen. Controlling the game becomes comfortable in no time, and before long, you’ll get to the meat of the campaign: smashing the Covenant!
A Second In Command
Mission 04, titled “World of Arcadia,” was easily our favorite of the front five. In the vacation nation of Arcadia, we had Spartans under our control for the first time and were tasked with protecting civilians as they ran frantically toward three evacuation ships spread across the area. This proved to be an excellent mission to showcase Halo Wars’ two-player cooperative mode: while we focused on beating back the Covenant, who were trying to kill the evacuees, our campaign cohort, Ensemble art director Lance Hoke, handled base-management and unit-production duties. Interestingly, we didn’t even discuss our roles beforehand: we simply fell into them naturally. He’d crank out units and then transfer them to us. Though the Covenant did manage to destroy one of the three escape ships, we still got over 800 people safely evacuated, earning us a gold star at the end of the mission. Our positive experience leads us to believe that Halo Wars will be just as fun to play cooperatively as any of the first-person- shooter Halo games.
The Flip Side
Naturally, Halo Wars also features an adversarial mode for up to six players on two teams (three-on-three). And like most RTSs, it’s got a Skirmish mode so you can square off against the A.I. on the multiplayer maps, too. These modes are worth noting not just because they’re the only ones that let you play as the Covenant, but also because the map we skirmished on was none other than the classic “Blood Gulch”!
It’s not an exact re-creation of our favorite boxed desert canyon — you have your own custom bases to tend to instead of the rotund structures you remember from 2001 — but it is familiar enough to be an appreciated fan service. Playing as the purple-clad invaders, we immediately devoted our resources to procuring two high-level units. One was the Arbiter, described by Pottinger as “much more of a Darth Vader, kill-everything type of bad guy” than Halo 3’s good-hearted sidekick, and one of the three Covenant leader characters who was can go into a rage mode with two energy swords at the cost of draining resources for every second it’s active. The other unit was the Scarab, which is more or less the most powerful unit in the game.
Because we were so dead-set on getting a Scarab, we had to play defensively, upgrading our purple-bubbled base with shields and turrets to buy us time to complete the long-under-construction spider-bot while the humans launched occasional attacks on our fortress. And we were nearly defeated at one point, too — saved only by the bullet-time heroics of our dual-sword-wielding Arbiter — before we finally finished manufacturing our monster.
With a small army of grunts, Jackals, Ghosts, and Wraiths in front of it, our Scarab marched to the UNSC base and promptly ripped it a new one. While most of our support units perished in the process, the Scarab lasted long enough to vaporize the entire enemy stronghold and ensure our total — if rather slow — victory. So yeah, commanding a Scarab was every bit as freakin’ awesome as we’d hoped it would be.
Finish The Fight
After spending a day with the game Microsoft hopes will be the killer app for console strategy offerings, we can’t say for sure yet if Halo Wars will draw us into the RTS genre the way Combat Evolved did for first-person shooters. We can absolutely say, though, that Halo Wars feels very much like a Halo game — a goal that’s no doubt high on Ensemble’s to-do list — and that we’re insatiably hungry to finish it. After that, who knows? There’s a whole new genre out there…
