Hands-On: Halo Wars

You've probably heard more about the business side of Halo Wars lately than you have about the game itself, and no wonder. When a publisher decides to shutter a veteran and well-loved studio like Ensemble right at the end of a lengthy, high-profile development cycle, it does tend to get people's attention. To me, the Ensemble closure cast Halo Wars in a doubly negative light; it's the last project for a good number of folks who are about to be out of work, and you can't help but wonder if the quality of the game--which this year we haven't seen or heard much of--had anything to do with the decision to break up the team.

The Ensemble guys are taking all this mess in stride, though. At least, the Ensemble guys who were in San Francisco last week showing off a nearly finished version of Halo Wars. They were all smiles, and keen to get the attention back on the product they've been slaving away on for at least three years now. Microsoft was letting people jump straight into the campaign from the title screen, so I sat down and availed myself of that chance.

Halo Wars lets you know right from the get-go that you're playing a Halo game, with HUD elements, sound effects, and an overall aesthetic that seem like they came straight out of Bungie. I was a little concerned the game would get lonely without Master Chief delivering one-liners and kicking ass, but the Halo universe is well-represented early in the campaign even without him. You get to see some other Spartans in the CG cutscenes. The Covenant is here in force, of course. Familiar UNSC and Covenant vehicle designs abound. Even Serina, the resident female AI onboard your ship, the Spirit of Fire, is like a stodgier British version of Cortana. It's unmistakably a Halo game.

The real question about Halo Wars is how it plays. Ubisoft Shanghai recently took a reinvent-the-wheel approach to console real-time strategy by bending the mechanics, camera angles, and controls in Tom Clancy's EndWar around the platform's controller. By contrast, Ensemble has trod the EA Los Angeles route, taking more traditional PC-style RTS concepts and finding ways to map them intelligently to the 360's controller. In other words, Halo Wars is very much about building up and fortifying your base, upgrading your way through the tech tree, and pumping units out of your buildings.

Nobody likes having to use an analog stick like a mouse. Thankfully, Halo Wars doesn't really make you do precise unit selection or tech-tree navigation with the stick. The controls are all about clever shortcuts that quickly give you access to the important elements. The right bumper selects all the units currently onscreen, while the left one selects all your units on the entire map. Once you've got some units selected, you can cycle through the different unit types with the triggers. Hitting one d-pad direction will move the camera to the bulk of your army; another direction takes you straight to your base. Building and upgrade queues are on pop-up radial menus.

Overall, I felt like I was getting around and getting things done efficiently after the first hour or so of climbing the control learning curve. The interface isn't perfect; I was disappointed there's no shortcut for splitting large groups of units (or all units of a given type) into smaller groups. If you want to select and move your Warthogs quickly, you're selecting and moving all your Warthogs. But overall the controls do work well enough, even if they're geared more toward broad tactical strokes than intensive small-group micromanagement.

Warthogs, Scorpions, Wraiths, Prophets, even Spartans--every memorable vehicle and character you can think of is represented as some sort of unit here. They all bring their own distinctive abilities and personalities into the mix, too.

• The Warthog special ability is a straight charge that runs right over enemies. You know, just like you've done 10 million times in the other Halo games.
• Spartans can jump onto and take control of enemy vehicles, which looks extra awesome when it's an aerial vehicle they have to leap 100 feet into the air to reach.
• Covenant Grunts go flying into the air when killed by an explosion. Their sticky plasma grenades are as annoying as they always were when they get stuck on your vehicles.
• There are six named hero units, three for each faction. The Covenant Prophets hover around the battlefield dispensing purity with heavy weapons. That looks pretty neat too.

I didn't get to play multiplayer against another human, but two skirmish matches let me get a good feel for both factions and the general flow of the game, which--again--feels very much like a PC-style RTS, what with all the tech upgrades and base expansion. The maps have a few interesting features here and there to change up the combat, like Forerunner supply stations that yield extra resources if you occupy them with an infantry unit, and teleporters that will zoom your army across the battlefield.

Halo Wars seems to be on track for its early February release. I'm pretty well convinced by the controls and what I've seen of the UNSC and Covenant factions that there's a fully functional and balanced strategy game here. The big question mark for me at this point is the campaign and storyline, which starts out with the Spirit of Fire heading to the planet Harvest, where the Covenant has been digging up some kind of ancient relic or artifact. Microsoft only let us play a few missions into the campaign, so the tasks I was doing felt simplified and early-game, as a way to get you used to the controls and base-building. I hope the later missions aren't all of the generic sort of "build up your base, pump out scores of units, then kill the other team's base" mission you've seen in every other RTS.

Toward the end there was a particular story mission that had me fighting my way out of the old base the Covenant had discovered, protecting a named scientist character as she tried to get some automated bridge controls online and make an escape route for us. The entire time, waves and waves of burly Hunters were pouring through side entrances. On the upside, I had a couple of Grizzly tanks with me, which is an extra-awesome heavy tank and one of the special abilities of Captain Cutter, the big cheese on the Spirit of Fire and one of the hero units you can use. That whole sequence was fairly intense and had a distinctly Halo-like feel to it. I'm optimistic there will be more of these moments in the final game.