Jigsaw's Blog: My thoughts on games (and other stuff)

Halo Wars Impressions

I finished off Halo Wars campaign last weekend. I really enjoyed the game yet for some reason I’ve not yet put my finger on I just did not feel like playing much of the multiplayer or skirmish modes. As a fan of the Halo universe as a whole (yes I read the books) I really like how Halo War’s story fills in some back info. I’m also a fan of Real Time Strategy games so it was really fun to play one with a Halo theme.

Ensemble really made the controls simple and basic but they worked. Especially the option to select all units of all the units on the screen with one button. Since that is what I generally want to do with my army anyway it was nice they made that easy. I also liked the D-Pad options to jump to the bases, leaders, and troops. The game has the standard Rock-Paper-Scissors of unit strengths, but with the technology levels to make units more powerful. One of the other great things about Halo Wars is the cut scenes. They are absolutely GORGEOUS. Other developers need to take note of them; if you are planning to put cut scenes into your upcoming game they need to looks this good.

There were two things disappointing about Halo Wars. First, there is no Covenant or Flood campaigns, but you can play as Covenant in the other game modes. I’d gladly pay to buy additional campaigns for these other classes are DLC. The other annoyance was that I complete the whole campaign and got only 9 of 50 achievements. Not even 1/5th of them. Guess they really wanted to push the other game modes by encouraging you to play them to get the achievements.

If you like Halo or RTS games I recommend checking out Halo Wars. It is a lot of fun and really nice looking.

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