Halo Wars

Halo Wars is not Halo! Just kidding, it's Halo expanded universe with a touch of simplicity. What is Halo Wars? as you have probably read elsewhere, Halo Wars is a Real-Time-Strategy game or RTS as it is known in the business and plays on the lore and expanded universe of the Halo FPS games released on the Xbox and Xbox 360. So, is it fair to compare Halo Wars to Halo 1, 2 and 3- no. Why? because they are different kind of games and only share the style and look, that is all. Halo Wars controls like many RTS games on PC such as Supreme Commander, Starcraft or Command and Conquer, bust instead of having a mouse and keyboard to do most of the commanding and strategy, you have the Xbox 360 controller which is okay, but can be limiting and can affect the speed of gameplay. Does a RTS work on a console? Yes, does it have dept and strategy as most PC RTS? No. What it does have is a fun factor and a feeling that you're playing with little toy men and watching miniature action sequences going off on screen- which can be very satisfying.

Story? Yes, Halo Wars takes place many years before the original Halo on Xbox, this time instead of only one Spartan (Master Chief) there are many that you can control and can really change the outcome of battle. The story is about the flood being located and the convenant's secret plot to recover a strange artifact to use it against the human race. Humans are protected by the UNSC which use large battleships and space-age technology to figth the good fight, as you control Forge, a military commander (voiced by the guy from Drake's Fortune) who finds himself in the thick of battle to save mankind. There is a scientist who wants to study the flood (a parasitic organism that remains neurtral) and gets captured by the covenant as a result. At the end everyone comes out happy and Harvest, one of the key planets of the Halo lore is destroyed and we see how and why (don't worry, not a spoiler, you can read it in the Halo novels). The story is very much a B-grade sci fi movie with great cinematic that leave you waiting for the Halo movie.

So, with Halo Wars out, Ensemble Studios out, Halo: ODST coming and possibly a Halo movie coming out, is Halo now a mainstream cultural series? yes, yes because everytime anything Halo comes out, it becomes a high selling, mainstream event that can only be compared to a Star Wars or a Spider Man movie. Halo is here to stay and I hope it does because even though Master Cheif's story is over, the Halo expanded universe is rich in story telling and excitment as seen in Halo Wars.