So here's why I think this game is so great:
The animations are beautiful. When elite honor guards are battling a squad of marines you watch as they toss them too the ground, jump on top and plunge their energy sword into the marines chest.
The units special attacks are true to the series. Grunts throw plasma grenades that stick to whatever they hit for a few moments before they burst. The banshee has a suicide ability that causes it to dive bomb it's target causing area damage right before it dies. Spartans can be upgraded to carry the spartan laser, and their special ability is to commandeer vehicles. Every time I'd get to a new perk level and read the descriptions I'd
It's simple. There isn't 1,000 different units to build or tech trees you can decide to follow. There's a barracks, n airfield, and a vehicle factory for both races and in general they each build 3 different units. More chess less Warhammer 40K; Easy to learn, impossible to master.
Finally:
The controls were not terrible like they are on every other console RTS. There are hot buttons on the dpad for jumping to bases and groups of units. The bumpers allow you to select all units or local (on screen) units. Once you've got a group selected you can cycle through the unit types with the trigger to command the marines to grenade a building while the rest of your units continue to battle grunts, for example. In the end, scrolling around the screen with the joysticks is always going to be more clunky than a mouse, but Ensemble does it better than anyone has in the past.
For someone like me, a fan of halo and the RTS genre, this game succeeds at everything it attempts. After the demo I'm super excited for it...I know, I'm so gay for Halo it's sad.
I had so much fun with Halo Wars I almost put Halo 3 back in my disk tray but then Dingy (who's also an contributor here but has never written anything) invited me over and we got into another dated game, Rainbow Six Vegas 2. R6V2 reminded me of how much I dislike tactical shooters. I like games where it's relatively easy to identify the origin of bad guy bullets before you're dead. In tactical shooters I tend to die 5 or so times before I even locate the enemy. But I had fun with my buddy playing coop, which is the only way I could possibly play a tactical shooter for two reasons:
1) Co-op allows one player (read: me) to run and gun, my preferable technique in shooters. I just pulled out the shotgun and ran up and flanked dudes while my more conservative friend hung back in cover and picked them off with the sniper or assault rifle.
2) I don't like commanding a team. I insisted that Dingy host the game so that he was player 1 and had the command duties. If it were up to me, I'd just leave the two CPU teammates behind so I wouldn't have to screw around with getting them to listen to me.
So yeah, I bought it used for $25 and I'll be returning it in the 7 day window for a full refund. I hear very good things about farcry 2, maybe I'll see if they have a copy of that used.
And that's it.
P>C AD.
