And now for something that isn't completely different, but isn't the same either, Halo Wars. The non-Bungie made Halo RTS (Real Time Strategy) that is set in the Halo Universe, but uses none of the Halo characters we know.

The Story: After shooting through scores of Covenant and Flood soldiers in three Halo first-person shooters, the United Nations Space Command's story rewinds a few years in Halo Wars. You follow the exploits of the crew of the UNSC Spirit of Fire, mainly its Captain, its onboard AI (Serina), its Science officer (Professor Anders), and its ground forces Commander (Sgt. Forge). The storyline is slightly confusing at first but eventually the pieces fall together to make a satisfying ending, though it's certainly not long and should take most players around five hours to play through. Your adventure gets underway on a colonised world called Harvest, where the UNSC battleship Spirit of Fire's away-team leader Sgt. John Forge is investigating Covenant activity. Along with scientist Professor Anders and the Fire's holographic AI construct Serina, they uncover a plot in which an Arbiter, in charge of the Covenant forces on the planet, gets his hands on a mysterious superweapon left by the long-extinct Forerunners.

The Game Type: The game grants you command of both the human UNSC forces in the campaing, and their archenemy the theocratic alliance of the Covenant in other matches. Halo Wars offers a decent quality cinematic presentation and a simple control scheme that makes the game easy to pick up and play, but the limited amount of units, short campaign, and dearth of multiplayer modes make it ultimately feel stripped. Halo Wars is a fun playthrough for casual real-time strategy and Halo fans, but there's not enough depth to win over hardcore strategy buffs.

The Game Play: Halo Wars' gameplay and control scheme are introduced through two tutorials, and while it didn't cover everything, it's not difficult to figure out the other stuff. The controls function adequately, but you're quite limited as to what you can actually do with them. For example you can select all units, all units onscreen, all units of a specific type, or all units within a small radius (which you can drag around to pickup units, but its border is sorta fuzzy, so at times you pick up more then you really want), but you can't assign units to custom groups or to escort a unit. All of this makes it difficult to manage units when you're trying to fight a battle on two fronts, so avoid that if you can. Combat is streamlined to just two buttons (X and Y), so you can easily point out the enemy you want vanquished, send your soldiers after them, and use special attacks where applicable.

In terms of churning out an army, you need to actually click on a building to access its build menu, and you need to construct certain buildings in order to construct certain units. You can return to your base with a tap of the D pad, but that gets frustrating in the heat of battle. You can also use the D-pad to switch between units, but again, that is frustrating in how it works. From the D-pad you can select global production rally point, from which all your troops (regardless of there base origination) will travel too, but your troops may get caught in bottle necks, or fighting bad guys on the way. You can also have base-specific rally points, you can't create them for different unit types. Also, watch where you place a Rally point; setting them too close to your bases also creates a gridlock that some units have trouble maneuvering through. Also, if would have been nice to have a pull up window to access your build menus from anywhere, instead of having to click on the builiding, but for the most part the controls work well in a variety of situations. The camera can also be frustrating; though you can zoom right in, you can't pull the camera out far enough to get anything resembling a bird's-eye view of the action, and sometimes you have to rotate the camera to see "under" overhanging objects.

One of the best things about Halo Wars is controlling the iconic units from the games. Leading a barrage of marines (ODSTs can be dropped onto the map at whim), Spartans (I was never able to build them in the campaign, they were set pieces that sometimes you could control), Warthogs, and Scorpion tanks is great, and all-new units are a welcome addition to the UNSC forces. Flamethrowers, mechlike Cyclopes (again, limited to certain levels), and the new Cobra and Wolverine vehicles work well, but should have been explained better. The Spartans are not only a lot tougher than regular marines, but they can also hijack enemy vehicles, or pilot a friendly vehicle to boost its effectiveness. Although there may not be a great variety of units at your command, each has a number of upgrades that offer significantly better firepower or defenses. But like most RTS games, building a fleet of your biggest tanks and attacking in one giant assault wave still usually wins the level.

The Game Narrative: You can tell this game was not made using the same graphics engine as Halo 3, the cutscenes look great (and can be skipping, mostly). The narrative is told via cutscenes (usually involved both the Human and Covenant side of things). Otherwise, the mission setup details is narrated by either the AI, Captain, or Professor.

The Grade: The only other console RTS I have played in recent years is Command and Conquer Red Alert 3, so I dont have a lot to say about how this game stacks up in its Genre. I did like the simplicity of the controls, and even the bases. But those also were some of the negative issues as you progress through the game. I also really dislike Time based levels (of which this had a few) where you have to do something in XX minutes, or you lose. At one point, my guys were just entering the required area when time ran out, and even though 1/2 of there were there, I lost, cause not all of them entered.

Overall, without really trying too much of the other non-campaign game play, I give Halo Wars a 6 out of 10. Its pretty to look at, but pretty thin on much else.

tRuMaN