Halo Wars Campaign Hands-on Who needs Master Chief when you have a MAC cannon?

It's twenty years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, and human forces have just won a fierce battle with the Covenant on the surface of the planet Harvest, an out-of-the-way world in the Epsilon Indi system. The Covenant have their beady little eyes on an ancient structure housing a mysterious relic, and they're determined to remove and study it. In response, the UNSC sends the Phoenix-class former colony ship Spirit of Fire (now re-outfitted as a heavily-armed warship) to investigate.

Helmed by the hard-nosed Capt. Cutter, Spirit carries an impressive payload of military hardware, including Scorpions, Grizzly tanks and Warthogs. But its most important cargo could be Prof. Anders, a female scientist sent by the UNSC to determine the nature of the artifact that has the Covenant so hot and bothered. Before she can examine it, however, she'll need a safe place to land, and Sgt. John Forge is just the man for the job.

As Halo Wars opens, the UNSC Marine is on the ground, reporting on Covenant movements near the artifact's location at Harvest's north pole, where he spots an Arbiter and a Zealot arguing over the relic. Forge is ordered to round up some fellow Marines, recapture a nearby UNSC base and stage an assault on the relic's location. And that's where you come in.

When in doubt, blow it up.

But before you can get to stomping Grunts, you need to know what you're doing, and there are two tutorials to help you on your way. The first lays out the basic movement, unit selection and attack controls, and the advanced tutorial digs a bit deeper into base building and resource management. The first tutorial deals with the absolute basics – moving your units around the battlefield.

At the most rudimentary level in Halo Wars, you select units with the A button and direct them with the X button. So if you want a hero unit like Sgt. Forge to head through a nearby gate, just use the left analog stick to place your cursor over him, tap A to select him, move your cursor past the gate and tap the X button. And like a good Marine, he'll dutifully follow your orders. The X button also serves as an action button. Tap X on an enemy and your selected unit will attack it. Hit X on battlefield cover and your unit will use it. Press X on a hovering sniper tower and your unit will take up position there.

But real-time strategy games are all about marshalling multiple units of varying strengths and abilities, and that's where console controls tend to muck things up a bit with layers of complicated menus. But Halo Wars is taking a more streamlined approach.

All your base are belong to the UNSC.

Soon you'll have a motley crew of units such as flamethrower-toting "Hellbringer" Flame Marines (anti-infantry specialists), quick and agile Wolverine mobile missile launchers (anti-aircraft) and multi-purpose Warthog vehicles at any given time, and they'll all serve different purposes. But Halo Wars makes it relatively easy to drill down into your group of units to choose and direct them separately. If your troops are spread far and wide you can tap the left bumper to select them all, or you can tap the right bumper to select only the units you see on-screen.

Once you have a group selected, you'll see icons for the representative unit types in that group at the bottom of your screen. Let's say you want to select only the Wolverines. Pulling the right trigger cycles through your unit types, highlighting them in the on-screen icon list. So just stop when you come to the Wolverines, and they're automatically selected. Then unleash their fiery goodness on those pesky Banshees hassling you from above. It's a nice way of providing quick depth of unit choice without having to pull up a menu. In, fact, menus are pretty much restricted to base operations and special functions of the Spirit of Fire (both of which we'll come to later).


But you don't have to rely on the right trigger/icon system to select units. By double-tapping the A button on a unit, you'll select all available units of that type. Or, if you just need to throw a chunk of your forces at a problem, holding down the A button turns your cursor into a large paint circle, and anything you touch with it will be selected.

Most units in Halo Wars have special attacks, and using them is as easy as tapping the Y button. Place your cursor over an enemy unit, and an X or Y will pop up, letting you know instantly what your options are. If any of your selected units have a special attack available (Marines have a deadly grenade attack, for example) you can instantly deploy it by hitting Y. These attacks have to recharge though, so you'll want to use them sparingly and time them right.

After you get a grasp on these basic combat controls, it's fairly easy to move around the battlefield, attack units and generally make a mess of the straggling Covenant forces at the beginning of Halo Wars. And once the controls are second-nature, you begin to notice the subtle polish beneath the surface. Warthogs sound great, all the units' animations are eye-catching and distinctly Halo-like, the music is high-quality and the storytelling is dynamic (over the radio, in cutscenes, through unit dialogue, etc.).

Er, I believe we have you surrounded.

The three missions I played were relatively short (about 15-20 minutes each) but gave a strong introduction to the storyline and feel of Halo Wars. At the end of each mission, you're given a score and ranking like in Halo 3. Depending on how well you do and how quickly you do it, you're ranked Gold, Silver, Bronze or Tin. And yes, you can find skulls in the Halo Wars campaign, but Ensemble has yet to explain if they'll be used the same way as the Halo FPS games use them.

I don't want to give anything away from the first few missions of Halo Wars, but it's safe to say that the classic Halo action is here, and Harvest isn't the only place you'll be taking the fight to the Covenant. By the end of Mission 3, you'll be heading to another star system where your help is sorely needed.

Real-time strategy games come in a variety of flavors, but Ensemble Studios has its roots in the enormously successful Age of Empires series, which includes resource gathering/management in the mix. In Age of Empires, that meant sending villagers out to fetch wood and gold in order to build up your treasury and materiel. And while resource gathering is a part of Halo Wars, it requires far less micromanagement than the AoE games. Ensemble rightly realized that Halo fans don't want to spend too much time digging in the dirt – they want to fight.

The Locust and Scarab animations are great.

Even base building has been simplified. In Age of Empires, you have quite a bit of freedom in where to place your barracks, keep, defense towers, etc. In Halo Wars, both Covenant and UNSC bases are confined to a single large (but expandable) headquarters. They both consist of a central unit with connected pads than can serve multiple purposes.

Building a barracks is as simple as clicking on a pad, bringing up a radial menu and choosing the barracks icon. The same is true for supply pads, which serve as your primary resource generators. Rather than sending off villagers to scavenge for twigs, you'll need to make decisions about how many pads you want to designate for resource production, keeping in mind that each pad that's producing resources can't be used to pump out tanks or Spartans. Each supply pad can also be upgraded, which is more expensive than adding a separate pad but frees up space for a different building type. There are also resources scattered around the battlefield, and units can be tasked with collecting these if you deem it worth their time.

Collecting resources may not be the most exciting part of Halo Wars, but you'll quickly realize how necessary it is once you start using some of the UNSC and Covenant special attacks that are ultra-powerful but quickly drain your storehouses. I'm particularly fond of the Spirit of Fire's Magnetic Accelerator Cannon which can be called in from above by forces on the ground. It costs a pretty penny to use, but it's devastating against enemy bases. Research the right mix of skills and build enough reactors back at your base, and you can even upgrade the MAC to fire two shots instead of one. Goodnight, Covenant HQ.

Although the Halo Wars campaign is told solely from the UNSC perspective, you can also play as the Covenant in multiplayer skirmish or online matches. I tried my hand at a skirmish using the Covenant and found them to be similar enough that I understood the rules while different enough to feel appropriately alien. The Covenant bases are set up in a similar fashion to UNSC bases, with a few differences. While human forces gain upgrades through building reactors, the history-crazed Covenant do so by researching "Ages" at their temple building. This makes for quick and easy upgrades, but the Temple is fragile – destroy this and the Covenant go back to square one.

On the march.

The Covenant also have a Contact Pad that, if used effectively, can be a real thorn in the side of any UNSC commander. Any Covenant unit that touches it will be transported to wherever the Prophet hero unit is on the battlefield, a useful tactic if you need to quickly move reinforcements to a siege or battle. And the Prophets are no slouches on their own.

The one we controlled, the Prophet of Regret (a well-known villain of the Halo universe) wields a powerful special attack called Cleanse, which is a laser beam that can be moved about the battlefield, destroying anything in its path. I used to obliterate a UNSC Elephant transport platform in a matter of seconds. And yes, I felt a bit dirty afterward.

According to Halo Wars co-designer and lead writer Graeme Devine, there are three key ingredients that make the Halo franchise so successful: visceral combat, addictive online multiplayer and an epic storyline. Real-time strategy games have historically been a hard sell to console gamers, and it remains to be seen how much crossover there will be between Halo fans and RTS fans. But in theory, if Ensemble can nail the notoriously troublesome console RTS controls and give Halo fans a satisfying experience in the universe they've come to love, then Microsoft could have a hybrid hit on its hands.

A Covenant base, bristling with building pads.

After my brief time with the Halo Wars campaign, I came away impressed with the controls – easy to use but deep enough to allow truly tactical thinking. And the larger-than-life Halo storytelling is here, too. From what I've seen so far, Halo fans will be quickly drawn into the prequel story, which includes strong characters, cool new vehicles and even a Cortana-like AI named Serina (fanboys, register your domain names now).

It's too early to tell how the full Halo Wars experience will hold up, and there are many unanswered questions. For example, the fact that bases are self-contained makes it easy to build and upgrade. But it also limits your defensive options. It could very well be that there are multiple solutions to this problem that I have yet to toy around with (Elephant outposts, nearby cover, etc.), but from what I've played so far, base defense seems like a low priority in Halo Wars. That could either lead to exciting field battles or a frustrating sense of helplessness.

And will the storyline truly flesh out the Halo narrative with fresh characters and answers to burning questions, or is it simply a means to an end? We'll find out soon enough, as Halo Wars is scheduled to ship in February 2009. In the meantime, I hope to see more from Ensemble's purpose-built Halo real-time strategy console title, and we'll keep you up to date with all things Halo Wars-related.