Halo Wars Who Knew You Could Play RTS So Well On A Console?

I’ve always liked the idea of RTS games. The IDEA of them. I have only played them sparingly until now for 2 reasons: #1. I work on a computer all day and do not want to game on one in my spare time and #2. Once I got online and tried playing other humans I found the experience very overwhelming. There’s no question that to excel at RTS you need to be thinking constantly, always on your toes, and operating 5 minutes ahead at all times. Halo Wars is the first RTS game that has allowed me to sit in the comfort of my living room and partake in this experience while making the controls almost as natural as could be. This is assuredly the RTS game for people that traditionally do not play RTS. The controls are just so solid and, in fact, are teaching me RTS concepts that I never quite grasped before. Conducting an attack on two fronts while switching back to the base and generating more units, and then jumping to another base and adding some structures and then getting back to the fight was just too much for my brain to handle before. The way that Halo Wars has structured its DPAD controls, however, makes it extremely easy for me to manage. If you haven’t selected a base recently then pressing left on the DPAD will always take you to first base, a 2nd push taking you to the next base you built. Pressing down cycles through whatever groupings of armies you have on the field, and it’s very good at knowing what a cohesive group is. Up on the DPAD opens your leader powers like unit healing and big bombs to drop, and right cycles through recent alerts (I don’t use this one often). The biggest strength of Halo Wars, and something it absolutely had to achieve in order to be successful, is easy and quick navigation across the field. The way they’ve set up the DPAD controls is perfect in this regard. That’s not to suggest all the controls are perfect. A couple small changes would have gone a really long way. For example, you press LB to select all units, and RB to select all units on the screen. Once you’ve got those groupings, however, you can then pull the right trigger to cycle through all the types of units, so you can easily grab all of your tanks, or just all of the tanks on the screen, for example. They don’t allow any more granular selection than this, however, other than selecting the units individually or clicking and dragging to select. It would have been so awesome if they allowed the user to create impromptu groups of units by pressing a button while cycling through the types of units, allowing me to grab one tank and two infantry units with a few trigger and button presses. If you’re careful with how you arrange your units on screen, however, you can achieve this anyway. Also, you know that any opponent you face is equally gimped, so there is a tremendous amount of skill the comes into play in how you arrange your armies before an assault. The game has a basic rock-paper-scissors setup for its battles, but really doesn’t stick to this very strongly. Aircraft are good against Vehicles, Vehicles are good against Infantry, and Infantry are good against Aircraft, or so they say. I have definitely had experiences online that violated this. I was being attacked by someone with about 8 aircraft and 3 vehicles, so I generated as many infantry units with level 3 technology RPG rocket launchers as I could and the guy still walked all over me with his aircraft. I’m finding that being familiar with the specific types of units your opponent is using and what their strengths and weaknesses are is far more important than adhering to the basic rock-paper-scissor methodology that they claim is in place. It’s a good rule to follow, however, and I love how whenever you are interacting with a structure they make sure that infantry effects are always at the top of the selection menu, vehicle effects are always in the middle, and aircraft effects are always on bottom. Again, this isn’t 100%, but most of the structure menus are laid out this way which makes for quick and easy study of the navigation system. I have completed the campaign on Normal and have finished 1/3 of it on heroic. It was pretty fun but nothing compared to playing the game online. I really like hunting for skulls and black boxes in the campaign, as the effects it unlocks really do change the visual aspect of the game, having grunts fly off into the air upon death, for example, or exploding into confetti. It’s the kind of unlockables I really like to see in a game. There are also a host of unlockables that are more than just visual, but they impair your score at the end of the game. The story is decent, and I expect that I will play it through again one day on easy just for the experience. I like trying to complete the game on Heroic as well, and can’t even imagine how difficult Legendary must be. I’ve played 15 matches online and won 11 of those, so the people playing online are about as inexperienced with RTS as you would expect. The game plays incredibly well even while torrenting heavily and I’ve never seen the effects of lag if there are any. It makes sense, though, because it’s not like there is a tremendous amount of communication required between the players’ machines for an RTS game compared to something like FPS or a fighting game. The games that I have lost I learned from, which was usually because I spent too much time building up an economy before an army, that careful balancing act that one has to perform in the first 5 minutes of every match. The first instructional video released by Microsoft on the game taught rush attacks which apparently garnished them much admonition from the RTS community. So, their second video was entirely focused on how to predict and prevent rush attacks, and I must say that their advice was spot on. I haven’t been the victim of a rush since I started performing a recon scouting mission about 3 minutes into every match, just to see how the person is building their base.

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