Halo Wars

Halo Wars Campaign spoilers, including the ending. Halo Wars takes all these soldiers, vehicles and alien weapons we’ve been fighting beside or against and lets you command the whole force. There’s a lot you can do with that idea in the Halo universe. The original game released on Xbox 360 in 2009. It’s a real-time strategy game, so you’re building bases, producing units, developing your forces and deciding where to send them while the enemy is doing the same thing. And it was designed around playing with a controller. That’s worth talking about because a lot of the work in a strategy game is simply being able to tell the right units to do the right thing quickly enough. Halo Wars keeps the base-building areas contained and gives you ways to select groups without making you individually direct every soldier on the battlefield. The story goes back to 2531, well before the first Halo. Captain Cutter and the crew of the Spirit of Fire are investigating Covenant activity on Harvest. Sergeant Forge and Professor Anders become central to what they uncover, with Serina running things aboard the ship. That’s a good group to follow. Cutter has to decide what his ship and people can afford to do. Anders is trying to understand the discoveries that make their mission increasingly dangerous. Forge has to deal with a lot of the danger directly. And Serina has plenty to say about the situations they keep getting themselves into. Their investigation takes them beyond Harvest, through Arcadia and eventually to a Forerunner shield world. The Covenant wants access to something that could make an already terrible war much worse. The Spirit of Fire is a long way from being able to call in whatever help it wants. That gives the missions different problems to solve. Sometimes you need to establish yourself and build up a force. Sometimes you’re protecting people, moving through hostile territory or getting something done before time runs out. Having a large army is useful, but it doesn’t automatically mean you’re spending its time in the right place. The units make that easy to understand. You recognize Marines, Warthogs, Scorpions and other pieces of Halo’s military world, and now you’re thinking about how they work together. You need to know what can handle infantry, what can deal with vehicles and what happens if aircraft arrive while you’re prepared for something else. It’s very easy to like a particular unit and keep building more of it. The other side gets a vote in whether that’s a good idea. If it’s bringing something your army handles badly, you need to notice before the whole group disappears. The base is part of that decision too. Supply production keeps things moving. Reactors open up access to more advanced options. Production buildings take space, upgrades take resources, and everything you invest in is something you aren’t spending elsewhere yet. There’s a lot of satisfaction in seeing that work. You prepare a force, send it in with a purpose, support it properly, and the thing that looked impossible a few minutes ago becomes manageable. Or you discover you forgot a very important part and have to make a quick adjustment before it costs you the base. The cinematic side of Halo Wars deserves some attention as well. Getting to see Spartans, Elites and the larger battles from outside the first-person view gives the game another way to show how dangerous these people and machines are. The strategy view tells you what your army is accomplishing. The cinematics can get close enough to show you what that actually looks like for the people involved. The ending is costly. Stopping the Covenant’s plan means sacrificing the Spirit of Fire’s slipspace drive, and Forge stays behind to make sure the job gets done. The crew escapes the immediate disaster, but it’s left without the normal way home. That’s a rough ending for a group that has been trying to stop a much larger threat. They succeed, and then they have to live with the cost of succeeding. It also leaves a very good reason to care about where their story goes next. There’s skirmish and multiplayer beyond the campaign, with leaders and abilities that change how you approach a match. A useful guide needs to explain those differences, show what to build and when, and give people a way to understand why a plan failed instead of just saying to produce a bigger army. For anyone using Definitive Edition, that’s an enhanced release available on Xbox and PC, including Steam, with the original DLC and its own achievement setup. I’ll keep it separate from the original Xbox 360 version when covering completion requirements. Black boxes, skulls, mission objectives, unit counters, leaders and economy basics all give us plenty to cover. Halo Wars opens up a different kind of game while keeping you surrounded by things that belong to Halo. It deserves a proper place in the series discussion.