Halo Wars: Definitive Edition (Xbox One)

Considering that the sci-fi shooting franchise Halo is essentially what put the original Xbox on the map as a console worth getting, it’s no surprise that such a monumentally successful series would soon try to branch away from its alien-shooting action into other genres to try and rope in new types of players while keeping the brand loyalists on board as well. The first spin-off game for the Halo series would choose to make things a bit more tactical, with the Xbox 360’s Halo Wars taking the franchise into the real-time strategy genre, and now with Halo Wars: Definitive Edition, all the DLC has been rolled into the base package to be enjoyed on the more modern Xbox One.

 

Shifting away from Halo’s usual approach of focusing on one soldier tearing through the ranks of the enemy, Halo Wars has the player in control of military strategy, their focus on tasks like establishing bases and allocating resources towards troop deployment and vehicle construction in order to help push back against the enemy’s forces. You will always start with one base to get things rolling, but from there the player needs to be smart about what new buildings they build, how many resources they spend creating forces to defend it, and they need to balance their own forward pushes to take down the enemy while ensuring that they aren’t spread too thin and left vulnerable. Resource accumulation is thus incredibly important, and while you can find a bit in the environment and start with a good amount in most situations, a lot of its gradual acquisition involves you building special attachments to the base to generate supplies. Buildings are also necessary for things like technological upgrades that will let you build more effective units or research upgrades, but then for things like troop training and vehicle construction, you must also have the appropriate locations in your base. You can often find new staging points to build new bases, but tactical considerations evolve from that as well, as a forward position might be a better building area for slow vehicles so they’re on the front line faster.

Besides the constant consideration of what you’re building and what troops you’re creating, you’ll also need to command soldiers as they fight out in the field. Naturally, a controller will never be able to match how easy troop selection is with a computer mouse, but Halo Wars: Definitive Edition has many different options to help you select different members of your forces before giving them orders. You can select them one by one of course, but you can also select troops in a small radius, select all troops currently visible on your screen, and command all your troops at once. Telling them where to go, who to attack, and whether or not to use special skills the units have is simple as well, especially since individual troops usually have only a few functions. Whether they be ground troops, cars, tanks, or flying warships, most of your forces will have a basic ranged attack and a secondary function that usually takes the form of a stronger explosive strike, although that’s not universal of course. Depending on the unit, they all have different advantages and disadvantages reflected in their cost to create, with things like tanks being expensive and slow but hard for other units to take down if they’re not heavy duty weaponry themselves. Flying units can move around the map with ease, but specialized units can take them down, and there’s an easy to understand range of counters the game explains in its unit creation menus. Even if you have an overwhelming numbers advantage in a fight, if your army’s composition isn’t right for what you’re up against, you can see your forces decimated, so tactical retreats can be necessary, your base usually sturdy enough to stand up to an enemy push save when your opposition has managed to gain the upper hand and develop better units than you. All in all, Halo Wars makes the real-time strategy elements pretty accessible for new players entering the genre, everything explained well and most of its elements kept simple, albeit perhaps a bit too simple for people looking for a complicated and lengthy battle system. While that is a subjective desire for more complexity, one objective issue is that the pathing of your troops can be a bit unusual at times. When every unit is an investment of time and resources, losing them because you told them to move to a location and they inexplicably went the long way to it and endangered themselves can be annoying, although it’s not so common as to make you constantly have to be fighting the game to make things work.

 

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition has a pretty solid foundation for its battle system, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t afraid to experiment with it in the game’s main focus: its campaign mode. Serving as a prequel to the rest of the Halo series but set far in the future when mankind has mastered space travel, Earth is under attack by an alien alliance known as The Covenant whose religious zealotry lead to them seeking to exterminate humanity. On one of Earth’s planetary colonies, The Covenant have uncovered what could be an incredible asset to their war efforts, and it’s up to the UNSC warship Spirit of Fire to prevent them from acquiring such a huge advantage. While the stakes do fit more into the construction you’d expect from a side story that can’t really be too impactful for fear of messing with the main series canon, it does give the game a strong goal to work towards and the cutscenes manage to make the crew of the Spirit of Fire enjoyable for the ride, with the starship’s AI Serina perhaps the highlight for her sarcasm in the face of more serious characters like the commanding yet flexible Captain Cutter and the devoted military man Sergeant Forge. Many of your missions will draw on the core mechanics of Halo Wars in their design but change things up to prevent them from just being mutual assaults between opposing bases. You will often still need to focus on developing stronger units and allocating resources properly, but the nature of your enemy and your missions change. Some may involve The Covenant having superweapons that must be approached in certain ways, such as setting up a bombardment to take down an energy shield, trying to maneuver around an incredibly powerful but stationary laser weapon, and there are even more mobile missions where you might have to either use what troops you are given or try and uses special vehicles called Elephants to create units as you continue to shift your area of operations. Optional objectives offer room for more variation as well, the player rewarded for being more effective, thorough, or explorative depending on what the missions ask of you. The Covenant aren’t your only enemies though, as the game introduced the other consistent Halo alien species The Flood as foes to take on as well, their parasitic nature allowing them to convert units to fighting on their side.

Unfortunately, despite their interesting organic weaponry and different approach to bolstering their forces, The Flood aren’t available in the game’s Skirmish mode, which serves as the game’s multiplayer component and means for battle outside of the story missions. In fact, you can only play as Earth’s military forces or The Covenant, and while they do feel distinct from each other with their units having different specialties and uses as well as unique buildings and vehicles, they’re the only two options you’re given. The Flood likely had to stay as foes to justify their effectiveness as enemies in the story mode, but it does still make the Skirmish mode a bit simpler than one might hope. The game does give the two armies different choices for their main commanders, each of them having special skills or unique to allow some variation. They can even take on the form of leader units, joining the battle themselves with unique skills and able to be revived if they fall. The multiplayer’s variety is better served by things like the maps and modes though, the layout of your battlefield allowing for different strategies when assaulting a base, some containing wide open stretches that are hard to defend, others having cramped lanes that are hard to push through, and some even containing teleporters or other devices perfect for surprise ambushes or holding down an area. The modes include the expected Standard mode where it’s all about taking down all the enemy’s bases, but Deathmatch instead has your bases and forces built up considerably already, the game skipping the building to get right into the battle phase you usually have to work your way up to. Keepaway shifts focus away from taking down opponents and instead involves you trying to infiltrate enemy lines and steal away their flag, while Tug of War is an interesting mix of battle and building as the goal is to have the stronger army, and you can do that by either focusing on your own production or using strategic attacks to sabotage the enemy’s efforts. The last mode and perhaps least engaging is Reinforcements, where the game doesn’t let you make your own troops, instead delivering them to you in waves for use. The strategy element isn’t as strong when the important decision making of development is removed from your hands, and it’s slow nature makes it a bit less thrilling than the constant need to keep track of your production in building-focused modes like Tug of War or the need to command troops constantly in the more action-focused ones like Deathmatch. However, most of the variety on offer in Skirmish is up to the task of making Halo Wars interesting even after you’ve finished the single-player content.

THE VERDICT: Halo Wars: Definitive Edition may not have the level of depth some real-time strategy games achieve, but its got both the story, technology, and alien races Halo fans come for and an easy to understand approach to building and troop development that allows players unfamiliar with the genre to ease in. The campaign includes many different mission designs for its base-building and troop commanding gameplay to engage with, and while the multiplayer could have uses more options for playable armies, the mode and map variety does salvage the Skirmish mode from feeling basic. Halo Wars: Definitive Edition does require you to strategize and play smart and keeps most of its elements straightforward enough to condense it into something compact but enjoyable and involved.

 

And so, I give Halo Wars: Definitive Edition for Xbox One…

A GOOD rating. If you’re looking to get into the RTS genre, Halo Wars: Definitive Edition is a good place to start. Generating resources, producing troops, and knowing when to strike the enemy are all important elements here even when the game is changing the basic rules of engagement for its missions. Troops have clear uses so its easy to work towards developing counters to what you’re up against, although rare hiccups in AI can make both your troops and the enemy behave in ways that hold both sides of the battle back from being as effective as they should always be. Mostly, Halo Wars is a game that makes you hungry for more content, and while it does a good job of making what it has more distinct, a bit more options would prevent things from blending together a bit. Halo Wars does capture that feeling of seeing your hard work pay off though, the early slow phases of a battle transitioning into triumphant assaults when planned well or sobering defeats when you didn’t plan properly.

 

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition is a good addition to both the real-time strategy genre and the Halo series, mixing the franchises elements into an easy to understand strategy game that doesn’t wear on too long, but had it stuck around to further expand the interplay of its simple systems and included more playable armies, it could certainly have kept going and kept players entertained along the way.