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The Writing-Cute-Things... Issue

Halo Wars

The plot of Halo Wars centers around the UNSC colony ship Spirit of Fire, during the opening days of the human/Covenant war, back when there was more than one surviving SPARTAN II and humanity thought they could win through conventional military action.

Photo by Dan Siney

HALO WARS

Platform: Xbox 360

Publisher: Microsoft

OK, first thing you should know: I’ve got an Xbox 360 demo unit. I use it to play pre-release review copies of certain games, such as this one (also

Dead Space, Ninja Gaiden II

, a few others). The second thing you should know is, whenever I try to connect my demo unit to Xbox Live I get error messages. So this is a review of

Halo Wars

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as a single-player game. I know, I know. It’s a real-time strategy game, and the whole point of those is multiplayer. Sorry—I’m laboring under a limitation inherent to my methodology.

Anyway.

Halo Wars

is a real-time strategy game based on the Halo franchise, the last Ensemble Studios project before Microsoft shut them down. (Which may or may not amount to much—it looks like the former Ensemble employees are just going to start up a new studio and keep doing what Ensemble did.) Ensemble created Age of Empires, by the way, so they do have a certain amount of experience in doing RTS games—those of you who’d complain about a Halo game not made by Bungie, I retort that I’d rather have a Halo game not made by Bungie than an RTS game made by people who don’t know RTSs.

The plot of

Halo Wars

centers around the UNSC colony ship

Spirit of Fire

, during the opening days of the human/Covenant war, back when there was more than one surviving SPARTAN II and humanity thought they could win through conventional military action and not a solitary unstoppable super-soldier activating

deus ex machinae

all over the galaxy. The Prophet of Regret is seeking out ancient Forerunner artifacts etc, and the Spirit of Fire follows the Covenant around to different planets and tries to beat them to whatever superweapons the latter are looking for, meet the Flood, and do everything you’d expect them to do in a Halo game. That’s the last I’ll say of the story.

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How do I like the gameplay? Well… it’s pretty good, for a console RTS, and keeping in mind that I’m not great at RTS games and have no idea what its multiplayer is like. It’s very clearly an attempt to adapt traditional PC RTS concepts to console use. You build bases, which let you harvest resources, and which build and upgrade units. It’s simplified—bases can only be built on specific pre-designated points, and structures can only be built on upgrade points around those bases—but it still follows the normal PC paradigm, and this is where most of the failings lie.

Using only the control pad, it’s hard to field multiple combined arms forces quickly and effectively. It’s relatively easy to use them once you get them (the game has a handy “select all units on screen” hotkey, and it seems like the units have enough intelligence not to demand rigorous micromanagement), but actually building a decent army with more than one type of unit is a pain when you probably have a few units hanging around your base you

don’t

want to make part of it. There is likewise no way to build hotkey groups, so executing a pincer attack, for example, is a pain—at the end your two forces will be jumbled together and you’ll need to separate them manually again. Each unit type has a special ability, which operates on a recharge counter, but if you have six marine squads with rocket launchers and you want three of them to fire at a tank while the other three wait so they can fire at a different tank, you are basically shit out of luck, because selecting three of your six marine squads is fiddly.

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Those complaints aside, I’m overall pretty fond of the game. The tech tree is cool to navigate—I like how, for example, the increased health upgrade for your marine squads is called “New Blood,” described as more marines per squad, and when you purchase it, the number of little visible marines in each marine squad actually increases. If you buy grenadiers for your warthog jeeps, they actually show up in the seats. I like manipulating the units and making them do things. I think the designers weren’t quite bold enough in their departures from traditional PC RTS tropes; it’s full of little moments where I find myself thinking “This feels suboptimal on a console,” but they’re not frequent enough to drown out the moments where I’m thinking “This is

fun to play

.”

(Compare to, for example,

Tom Clancy’s EndWar

, which is an RTS designed from the ground up with console play in mind. It lacks a lot of the elements most people associate with the RTS genre but has

no

“Suboptimal on a console” moments.)

MOON

Platform: Nintendo DS

Publisher: Mastiff

Moon

is a single-player-only FPS in which the player controls Major Kane, a space marine in an astronaut suit (seemingly all the humans in the game wear astronaut suits, presumably to save on memory), as he explores an alien complex below the surface of Luna. The D-pad (or face buttons, for lefties) moves him forward, back, left, and right, while the L (or R) trigger fires his gun. Looking up and down, turning, and switching weapons is done with the stylus. In certain sequences, he drives a moon buggy, or takes control of a small remote-controlled drone to explore ducts too small to crawl through himself.

I’ve just described the entire gameplay experience. The game is a mass of repetitive hallways, samey-looking enemies, and strafing to dodge globular energy bullets. Oh, and story sequences handled like Metal Gear Solid’s CODEC, but without the voice acting.

It’s almost too simple a game to be bad—there’s hardly anything present the developers could have fucked up. At the same time, there’s really nothing compelling here, either. It is as generic as it’s possible for an FPS to be. If, as a DS owner, you’ve ever found yourself thinking, “You know what would make my life better? A decently executed but bland first-person shooter for my Nintendo DS to play on the bus,” I guarantee you’ll love this one.

Me, I’d rather read a book.

STEPHEN LEA SHEPPARD