When I realized today marked the release of Halo Wars demo, I got extremely excited. Normally, I am not a huge fan of console RTS games, but I have been reading some great previews of the game recently. Ensemble Studios, the now defunct developer of Halo Wars, has tried their best to build a real time strategy game that works on the Xbox 360. Have they succeed? I would say yes!

First off, the 1.4 gig download seemed to take forever, probably because the rest of the known universe was salivating from staring at their “Active Download” screens, just like I did. Before touching the campaign, I started with the tutorial and got a feel for the simple controls. After learning the “Basic” and “Advanced” controls, I jumped into the demo campaign, which consists of two, somewhat short, missions. In the first, you recover “alpha base” from the covenant and in the second, you stop them from blowing up some shrine. Unfortunately, I am not up to date on my Halo lore beyond the three games, even though I have a couple of the novels sitting on my book shelf.

The controls are much easier than most PC and console port RTS games. It uses a simple circular menu for units, upgrades and the bases have only certain spots for your buildings, which helps keep the confusion minimal. This mechanic also allows the developers to keep the screen full of units instead of spread out buildings. The graphics are good, but not superb. The units look a little fuzzy, but that could be that I have a 46 inch LCD, which makes everything look larger than the developers intended (I assume). The units are basic, but that might be because of the demo limitations.

As for the game, it is fun, simple and looks great. I think that the greatest part of the game are the cinematics, which are absolutely stunning and are on par with most CGI films released this past year (i.e. Resident Evil: Degeneration, Final Fantasy: Advent Children, etc.). As for the story, Halo Wars is set 20 years prior to the first Halo game, but I think it has some potential, but it is not why we are here.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my experience with the game and recommend you download it and try it for yourself. This is basically Starcraft minus most of the complicated skill trees and difficulty. Stay tuned to AmpedGaming.com for a full review when the game is released.

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