I decided to take an early lunch today and check out the Halo Wars demo. The demo has three parts. First there are the tutorials, there are two campaign levels, and then you can play 1v1 skirmish against the AI.

I’m a long time Real Time Strategy (RTS) fan, but I tend to play more on my Xbox 360 than my PC because I prefer to game sitting on my couch looking at my 42″ tv and not sitting at my desk with a much smaller monitor. I’ve played a lot of the RTS games (Command & Conquer 3, Universe at War: Earth Assault, Supreme Commander, Battle for Middle-Earth II , & Band of Bugs) available on the Xbox 360 so far. For pretty much all of these the controls are the biggest issue with the game. The controls are generally complicated and there is a lot of navigating through menu trees. Yes, they are workable, but they are far from ideal. I think the issue with most of the control schemes is that they try to let you do everything you can with a keyboard. Halo Wars went a different route and has a very simple control setup. There are no multi-layer menus of building options or grouping setups. Yet, even with the simple controls I felt like I had plenty of options to do everything quickly and easily. For example, hitting Left on the D-Pad takes you to your base so you can train more units, research upgrades, and build base expansions. You move and attack with your selected units by hitting X. No, need to highlight unit types, then select a target, and then choose an attack type. Just grab your units, highlight an enemy and hit X.

I found the tutorials to be a little slow paced, but for general fans of the Halo series who are not familiar with RTS games the tutorials will be really helpful. The basic tutorial covers moving and attacking, and the advanced tutorial covers special attacks, base expansion, and unit upgrades.

After completing the two tutorials there are two campaign missions available. The first one was pretty quick and involved gathering together some scattered troops and then retaking a base. The second mission was much longer and more involved. You get full use of your base and can train troops as you see fit. Like most RTS missions once you have your troops you proceed to destroy all enemy forces off the map. I plan to replace the second mission another time or two to check out all of the optional mission objectives and try different troop combinations.

In addition to the two campaign missions you can play 1v1 skirmish against the AI on a single map. From the available options that are grayed out it looks like there will be skirmish options for up to 3v3 battles on a lot of different maps. Plus, there will be all of the multiplayer options available that the demo doesn’t let you check out.

Graphically the game looks great. It is beautiful really. There are tons of details in the units and level layout, and I did not notice any repetitive textures like many RTS maps are plagued with. The cut scenes are some of the best looking that I’ve seen in a long time. Frankly, it lives up to the Halo name and the level of quality I expect from the franchise. Even the menus have a similar layout and feel to what we’ve gotten use to in Halo 3.

The the little bit of the story you get in the demo seems pretty cool. It is set before the Halo games and covers some of the UNSC battles 20 years before the events in Halo: Combat Evolved. I’ve read all of the Halo books and really enjoy the Halo Universe in general, and I like that they are basically giving more back story to the Halo games through Halo Wars.

I really like how the game focuses around the battle and not about micro-managing resources. There are still resources, but once you build a supply pad on your base they will start rolling in resources automatically. Build a second supply pad and have double rolling in. For the first couple missions it seems like two supply pads was more than enough. As long as I did not get all my troops killed I never really ran into issues with not having enough resources. This simplicity in the resources is nice because it lets you focus on the best part of RTS games…The Battles.

I really like just about everything in the demo, other than it would be nice it had more levels and maps available. But then, that is probably true of most demos. Still, it does a good job giving a feel of how Halo Wars will play once it releases on March 3rd. I really like the direction that Ensemble Studios is taking by focusing on the fighting and not the resource managing parts of RTS games. I may not be getting it the say it releases depending on what game I’m playing a month from now, but I’ll have it by mid-March for sure.