![]() As this is a side story without too much relation to the main series, I’ll go ahead and recap the plot of Halo War 2’s campaign and its two DLC expansions. “A huge UNSC combined force claiming a Forerunner structure.” ![]() ![]() I still find the unit constraints and other limitations many campaign missions force on you to be pretty annoying, but this is typical of single player campaigns in RTS games, and I at least found some of these scenarios, particularly the mission “Hold the Line” (a straight-up tower defense ripoff) to be pretty fun. As such, there were points at which I returned to the cheesy strategy of massing a single type of unit, most notably fully upgraded Banshees when playing the last few missions of the Awakening the Nightmare expansion.Īs with the first game, I opted to lower my difficulty level down to “Normal” in the interest of keeping my playthrough from being too laborious, but while there were definitely still a few difficult spots where I found myself caught in a bit of a grind against unit attrition and/or base defense versus exploration or aggressively seeking out objectives, overall it felt a little less challenging, at least until I got to the DLC content. In the end, I still relied mostly on the basic controls of selecting every unit, all units on the screen, or units of a particular type rather than grouping them more strategically as I might in a PC RTS. The UI has been totally overhauled, and while many of the controller bindings and interface concepts are the same as in the first game, they’ve definitely been improved and expanded upon, particularly when it comes to unit selection. “The Flood aren’t the only ones who can field ridiculous numbers of the same unit.” About my only complaint is that, unlike in the original Halo Wars, your units are all colored with the multiplayer forest green color rather than the typical olive green we associate with the Master Chief. Whether this was an attempt to appease older fans or simply justified for the in-universe reason that the Spirit of Fire and her crew had been drifting since before Halo: CE (and without any fancy nanomachine upgrades) I don’t know, but I appreciate it in any case. As for the units, Halo Wars 2 sticks with designs much closer to those of the original Halo trilogy than 343’s later revisions. Hopping into my first mission I was struck by how much better the effects, animations, and particularly the environments looked than in the first game. Oh my! Blur is back and their work here is top-tier, even more impressive than in the original Halo Wars. Immediately upon loading the game up I was struck by its presentation, as extremely close-up shots of units in combat cycle in the background showcasing a change in both art direction and graphical fidelity the further you zoom in the more the individual units start to look cartoonishly stylized, almost appearing like figurines from a tabletop wargame. Cutter and Jerome-092 are back, along with a new friend.” Likely pretty exciting for fans of the first game, though, like I mentioned in my Halo 5 post, I was out of the loop on all things Xbox for much of that generation. Speaking of, Halo Wars 2 would be developed by another studio with some serious strategy game credentials, Creative Assembly, best known for their Total War series. Still, I’m curious about what inspired them to make Halo Wars 2 beyond 343 Industries’ continued efforts to grow and diversify the franchise, particularly with Ensemble out of the picture. It seems that neither my observations about the first game’s questionable intended audience or its odd, semi-forgotten place in the Halo series necessarily correlated with low sales numbers. I was both surprised and more than a little pessimistic when I heard that Halo Wars 2 was in development for the Xbox One.
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