Okay so I've not posted any blogs yet and that usually chucks me into a vicious cycle of not posting unless I can think of something of supreme relevance, and that's never going to happen. So yeah I'll just do it this way instead. For starters; hi, I'm Simon.

Ahh, done away with the formalities.

Right, yes, I've been sinking some time into Ensemble's swan song Halo Wars - 15 hours and 8 minutes to be exact - and I finished it up earlier today. It's pretty nice. I don't normally play RTS games because my computer frowns at anything resembling games and I'm not big on the whole office space gaming thing in general. In fact, if I were to delve into a modern RTS on the PC today I would feel completely and utterly stupid. You know how these things keep getting more advanced without you and when you attempt re-entry you're greeted by blank stares of unmistakable  "you're supposed to know these things already"-ness.

Being a gigantic Halo fan who actually reckons the campaigns in those games are phenomenal (with Halo 2 being a slight dip in quality) I gladly charge into anything supposedly "canon" regardless of genre. Since I've basically reverted back to an RTS noob whose last encounter with the genre was KKND, I'm pretty much Ensemble/Microsoft's favourite consumer in regards to Halo Wars.

Because Halo Wars is kinda simple. It's not stupid, shallow or unrewarding, it's just very streamlined and consoley and graspable in more ways than one. The controls take some getting used to and you have to unlearn some fundamental unit management philosophies if you step out of a PC RTS and into this one. You pretty much select a bunch of units and then you press RT to cycle through them and use each unit type to counter whatever they're good against. You've got building killers, infantry killers, air unit killers, etc. Each unit also has a unique ability that you can add once your tech level is advanced enough, and that's used manually by pressing the Y button. Warthogs run over infantry units, Wolverines fire a barrage of rockets useful for overwhelming larger vehicles, and so forth. All of these take some time to charge back up after use aswell, but the immediacy of those kinds of elements require you to be *in* the battle, not necessarily just send a bunch of dudes to a location and then zoom off across the map. As such, the game feels fairly action based and arcadey, and it forgives the rather limited and linear base building component. Missions also offer enough variety in objectives to keep things from growing stale.

I haven't touched the multiplayer modes yet but will do so later this week. At this point I'm pretty satisfied with how the game turned out, although far from ecstatic. The campaign - even at a respectable 10ish hours (15 for me because I'm anal about secondary objectives) - comes off as quite short, and even though they clearly insist that you replay it on different difficulties ("Halo" style I suppose) with a scoring system in place and secret "Skulls" and "Black boxes" littered around the place, you're left with a distinct want for just.. more missions and scenarios. I guess it could be just right for the console gamer RTS virgin, and it's certainly not a criticism that you wanna play more of it, but with Ensemble's closing leaving sequels uncertain, it's a bit disappointing that the experience for a solo player couldn't be more substantial.

But really, I could change my mind completely when I try out the co-op component and higher difficulty settings, not to mention the proper versus stuff. I'll keep you posted. In fact, I'll probably write some sort of hamfisted review of it at some point later this week.