Now Playing: Halo Wars

Halo Wars, originally released on the X-Box 360 in 2009, is a console designed RTS game set within the Halo universe. Although I do like the Halo series and I’m a fan of strategy games in general, I was always wary of playing Halo Wars because, at the risk of sounding like a PC snob, I wasn’t entirely convinced that an RTS game designed for console would be all that compelling to play.

But here we are in 2022 and when I saw Halo Wars on sale on PC, I figured it was time to give it a shot and see if I was wrong. So was I? Well . . . no. From a strategy point of view, Halo Wars is very simplistic. There’s not a great deal of depth to the game in terms of mechanics. This doesn’t make it bad, just . . . not very compelling for anyone who has played pretty much any other PC RTS game over the last several years.

But, to be fair, I’d say Halo Wars is well designed when you take into consideration the limitations of the original platform, the fact that everything had to be easy to manage and control from a gamepad, and that most of the audience of Halo Wars at the time of its release may have never even played an RTS game before. When you factor in all of that, Halo Wars is actually a pretty impressive achievement.

They really did make RTS work on console and make it accessible to new players. That said, it’s not like consoles hadn’t seen ports of PC RTS games before Halo Wars – I sunk countless hours into Command & Conquer and Warcraft 2 on my Sega Saturn. But those games clearly weren’t designed for the console platform whereas Halo Wars was designed from the ground up purely for console with console limitations in mind.

Only it’s not only on console now, but on PC, and on PC those limitations can prove rather frustrating. The worst example of this is precise unit control – even though you can now play Halo Wars with a mouse, units in the game still move and reposition largely independently of your command. Because Halo Wars was originally designed for a less precise controller method, making it easy to select, group and move units. They form up together, move at uniform speed and attack targets at will.

 
All you really need to do in Halo Wars is pump out units, select various upgrades, press to ‘select all’ and then click somewhere near the enemy. The ‘strategy’ of Halo Wars is more about choosing your build order and what upgrades to pick first. It’s simple, but it works, and if you were new to RTS and playing this on a gamepad at release, I’m sure you would have had a good time – especially if you were a Halo fan.

Because Halo Wars does feel very much like a Halo game when it comes to sound, music, visuals and – most importantly – story. The main campaign is a fairly substantial affair with extensive CG cut scenes leading into every mission. It is, overall, a pretty decent campaign with a decent level of variety in terms of maps and objectives. And that’s really where Halo Wars rises above its simplistic gameplay – with the narrative driven campaign and the variety on offer within.

Beyond the campaign, Halo Wars has a pretty decent Skirmish mode where, unlike the campaign, you can also play as the Covenant. There’s a few different modes and several maps and I had some fun with it after finishing the campaign but honestly, once you know an efficient build / upgrade order, you can largely sit back and just let the game play itself. Select all – move – win. I’d frequently Alt-Tab out of matches whilst I waited for my units to build because there really wasn’t a lot else to do.

Overall, Halo Wars is kind of a difficult game to recommend. It’s certainly not a bad game and, as I said, it’s actually very well designed when you take into consideration when and how it originally released. But in 2022, on PC, it’s a basic, fairly dull RTS that’s only really fun to play through if you like the Halo series. If you don’t give a shit about Halo, but like RTS, I really wouldn’t recommend it.

But if you do like Halo and RTS then you’ll probably enjoy playing through the campaign once, maybe a few skirmish matches and then you’ll say ‘that was okay, I guess’ before uninstalling it. I am curious about Halo Wars 2 though, considering it was designed for both PC & console at release. Maybe if that comes to Steam, I’ll give that a spin.

6/10