Typical fist-pumping Halo action, a strength and a weakness. It’s not about building the biggest army in any of the 12 missions available, but rather surviving long enough to see the next stage as an unrelenting force closes down on you while your Spartan heroes pull off acrobatic feats of circus carnage in any warzone. Halo built a franchise on first-person action, an idea which has shaped the campaign of Halo Wars 2. Halo Wars 2 is a Halo game through and through, one step removed from being a sequel to Starship Troopers as it brings an OORAH attitude to the tale of the UNSC Spirit of Fire and its ongoing battles to keep the threat of The Banished from reaching our solar system. There’s an undeniable creep of influence from the likes of StarCraft 2 or Dawn of War in the construct of Halo Wars 2, but you’d have to squint to notice it. The end result is a faster version of strategy on console, where players focus more on smaller and varied armies with tight controls. To tinker with the control scheme and introduce tweaks where necessary. To keep the action constrained but focused. Which translates to a brilliant game that is typically Halo-ey.Ĭreative Assembly’s smartest move for the sequel was to build on what had come before. A smaller scale, fewer controls and the attitude of a scrappy underdog. Halo Wars 2 however, feels like the complete opposite. In comes strategy game heavyweight developer Creative Assembly, the studio behind various Total War games that feature thousands of troops clashing at any given time on the PC battlefield.
Eight years later, and Ensemble is no more.
Not only did it somehow manage to translate mouse and keyboard controls to a more limited Xbox 360 controller, it did so brilliantly. But then along came Halo Wars in 2009 from Ensemble Studios.
Or at least the only platform capable of nailing it properly. The ability to command vast armies, dedicate resources towards base construction and assign specific units to specific roles was always thought to be the exclusive domain of PC gaming. Strategy games were never meant for consoles.
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