Updated 08.01.17

Halo Wars was released way back in 2009 and is a Real Time Strategy game.  I’ve owned it for donkeys and I always meant to continue with it but just never did.  I’ve only played the first couple of chapters as seems to be the case with many of these #YOLG games.

Well, the game was fired up in earnest last night and ‘now’ is the time.  The game is set twenty odd years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved and you control beautifully detailed miniatures of Halo soldiers and vehicles against the dreaded and somewhat purple Covenant forces.

This title was renowned for the gorgeous way it presented itself through vivid cutscenes and great character acting.  Yup, I can confirm that this old 360 game still has the chops as far as cutscene looks go, it’s great.  On the other hand the gameplay is starting to look a little ropey here and there.  Controlling the ‘units’ around the world map is fine but when the camera pans across the play field before you take control, it looks very ‘low def’.

Thankfully the gameplay is fun.  Not 100% sure that my technique is what a top general would use but I’m managing to scrape through.  I think I should really be selecting small groups of units rather than sending them in one big mob to every enemy that appears.  Ah, well I’m sure it will come to me.

04.01.17

I’m really not very good at this.  My tactics are as follows: Build as many troops and vehicles as possible and send them in a big blob to every purple enemy dot.  There must be a more efficient way to group little batches of troops and have them stand guard at strategic areas?  ‘Big Blob…..kill, die, repeat.’

I ran through the advanced training module to try and get my head around some of my poor man and machine management issues.  Although it did highlight a few button presses and commands there seems to be a lot more things you can make your little army do.  Must be the age of me and the age of the game……it expects me to go learn and is definitely not holding my hand.  Easy to play, hard to master.

Bloody fun though.

08.01.17

Darn that was fun.  It took almost to the end of the game to start to understand all the intricacies of the controls but when I got there I was kicking Covenant butt like a goodun.

The story of the game is simple enough: The Covenant have discovered a world with ancient technology that with its secrets unlocked will give them unlimited power against the humans.  You have to stop them.  The cut scenes in the game are still fantastic, movie worthy.  I really enjoyed them.

Overall the game is still well worth playing.  I’m not really an RTS fan but controlling little miniature Halo characters for the length of this game was fun.  The gameplay is solid if a little hard to get to grasp with, but pay off is that the story and protagonists were good playmates.  Mega fun.

#VictoryAchieved Game Complete.