I finally got a chance to look at Halo Wars this weekend – unfortunately we don’t have the space to cover all the games we’d like to in the magazine, and even if we did, our termly release schedule means we’d be telling you about games you played months ago anyhow. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the blogoweb, I can tell you my thoughts as I think them. Let’s try that now.

Strategy is an old man’s game. The young ones, the hip console crowd, they do the killing and the shooting while the old men with their grey boxes sit behind desks and think about flanks and armour penetration and suchlike. That’s the way things work. So it’s sort of understandable that Halo Wars, the attempt to convert the Halo franchise from first-person shooter to eye-in-the-sky RTS, has garnered a lot of criticism from various sources.

A lot of it, ultimately, comes down to snobbery. Strategy games have never really worked on the consoles before, and it’s largely down to the shoehorn-like manner in which they were designed for controllers and TV screens. Being up-close and personal with a monitor and a mouse makes micromanagement in games like Company of Heroes a comparative breeze.

So there was this presumption that Halo Wars was dumbed down, over-simple, and generally a bit naff. The only way it could possibly work on a console would be to strip out all of the advances made in the last ten years that have transformed and vastly improved the genre. The observations are absolutely spot on, but an hour with the game has made me feel that the criticisms really aren’t. Halo Wars is what the consoles have always needed. But it might not be to everyone’s tastes.

At its base, Halo Wars is powered by Command and Conquer, the original format relaid in 3D. For people of around my age, Command and Conquer represents the beginning of the modern RTS era, an era that ended with the release of – yes, that game again – Company of Heroes. Unit combat was cut back to the point where most things killed most other things if given the chance; progress was linear, through a very strictly-designed series of map; the resource model was nearly nonexistent and the aim of the game was building the biggest, stupidest army you could and making it go boom.

It was amazing fun.

Consoles never really had the chance to have their Command and Conquer moment. This was mainly down to developers trying to force designs geared for PCs onto television screens, which didn’t work for a whole number of reasons that aren’t worth going into here. What matters is that it got decided, at some point, that consoles just didn’t do strategy games. They couldn’t. It was impossible.

But it wasn’t impossible. What was needed was a little consideration for the target technology. Instead of a mouse-like cursor scrolling, the cursor is always in the middle of the screen. The drag-select mechanism is replaced with a few button strokes that can group and select obvious collections of units – everything on the screen, for instance, can be called on with one button. Building placement is removed – it’s all composed around a central headquarters.

It’s not streamlined, it’s not perfect, but it’s a start. And on top of that, there’s a really glorious attention to detail. I’m not a Halo fan, but even I can appreciate the way the Warthogs bounce and roll, the animations of the infantry – it really could be a Halo game from a few hundred feet up. And this combination of a friendly design with a famous face is probably going to make this a landmark title.

The horrible irony is that Halo Wars actually suffers from many of the problems that marred Command and Conquer twelve years ago. The AI is omniscient, some of the mission scripting is way off, and a lot of the missions are actually quite dull. But that’s one of the reasons why Halo Wars gives off such a positive vibe – they might be slipping up, but they’re slipping up on the right track. They made the right changes to the genre in the right places, and the result is more playable than any strategy game to grace a gamepad that I’ve seen.

In Issue Two of the magazine – which is now online – we had our angry Flamebait section charged with a tongue-in-cheek attack on console gamers, putting PC gamers as a higher breed, a more cultured one. There’s a gap between the two worlds, I think, whatever your opinion on it. There are some people who will simply be unable to take Halo wars seriously. But for consoles, it’s a great step forward.

Tags: Halo Wars
Categories: Another Look

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