Halo Wars (Xbox 360) Preview

The war between the creatures of the Covenant and the forces of the UNSC has shown several times that a FPS could be very playable on console. With Halo Wars, Ensemble Studios which is the last project before closure must prove that the other kind usually reserved for the PC and its duo keyboard and mouse can be successfully adapted to a machine for living. The events described in Halo Wars take place twenty years before the first Halo on Xbox. That is why you do not find the hero version of the FPS series, the Master Chief. It is also a rather clever to not desecrated this character has now a recognition comparable to that of Lara Croft or Duke Nukem. Halo Wars is a game of real-time strategy meeting the canons of the genre. So, as it leads an army made up of many units of different types, Master Chief would have been lost in the shuffle. Not good for the image...

The primary mission of the developers has been set to adapt the principles of RTS to the few buttons, joysticks and buttons found on a joystick. For that, they chose the fairly common but still effective radial menu. Once you place an object or a place where you have several options, a circle containing all the proposals will be displayed. The player then has to scroll with the joystick and then select the one that interests the Action button for the game will accomplish the task requested. Simple and very practical. The same applies for the selection of units on the ground. It may take units, maintaining a key, and then move the joystick to select a group, calling all units of a certain type or, finally, give the same order to all his army. Nothing is complicated and everything runs very quickly in that, at most, an action requires a combination of two keys.

The missions will be capable of strategic and tactical. For the former, we develop our base as we have to explain it, and when you feel strong enough to file on the enemy for the chop menu. In a tactical mission, the men and units available are provided in advance. The reinforcements are rare, and anyway, it does not have a basis to generate new forces. We must do what is a. The other imperative, present in both types of mission is to protect these heroes when they are present. Halo Wars takes up this principle that you will enjoy the gifts of some important figures such as repair of power armored units or be able to hack a computer terminal in order to open a door.

To all these generalities, Halo Wars brings cosmetic touches linking to the license which it arose. For example, you can build battalions Warthog, the all-terrain vehicle that already fast flew in the FPS. On a different note, we also face the devastating Covenant Scarab. To overcome one of these monsters of power will require policy utilizing the arsenal, such as cryo-bombs that will freeze the armored legs and make them very vulnerable to fire grenades. Halo Wars promises to be strategy orchestrated and perfectly adapted to the machine that will receive it early 2009. Nevertheless, we cannot conclude this article without sharing our doubts about a very specific point. Indeed, the conduct of missions seemed very linear. As we have said, we could not see the first missions. Also, it seems that the game will feature a coop-mode. This could be very interesting since Halo is a series in which team play has always been important.

Re: Halo Wars Game by 13man: 26-03-2009 23:20:07