TL;DR – Halo Wars 2 is a pretty fun RTS that’s a great intro to the genre for console babbies. For more experienced RTS players it’s still a fun experience, thanks to it’s high production values and the addition of optional objectives which give the game some challenge. The game looks great even on the base Xbone, the soundtrack is decent, the characters are a bit bland but perfectly fit the Halo universe and it’s just a good game. The only complaint I could really make about is the obvious one, namely that consoles aren’t really suited to RTS game – but Halo Wars 2 does a good job of making unit control intuitive and letting you instantly switch between various bases and groups of units. As far as a console RTS can go, Halo Wars 2 is a rock solid experience. As for the amount of content on offer, the campaign itself is fairly short (it took me just under 6 hours) but completionists can try for higher ranks and the game has skirmish mode, full co-op for the campaign and a bonus Blitz mode. So there’s plenty of content here, with a high production value and most importantly enjoyable core gameplay.
Halo Wars 2 is quite a follow up act, as it has to compete with a game by the veritable but alas now defunct Ensemble Studios who made the first game. Fortunately Creative Assembly (CA) was up to the challenge, as they’ve managed to expand upon Halo Wars 1 while maintaining a high level of polish and some fun campaign mission design. For those who didn’t play the first game, Halo Wars was an attempt to bring RTS to consoles (specially the Xbox 360) which did away with most of the faff by streamlining base building, resources and unit types. That’s not to say that there aren’t plenty of units, but every one is either an infantry unit, a vehicle, an air unit or a hero. There are very units in the game that are good against all of these unit types. As such most of the strategy is about building a balanced force and ordering units to fire against the enemy units they’re good against. So far, so standard. The twists that Halo Wars introduced were unit abilities, and commander abilities. The former are activated by hitting Y on the controller and range from grenades, to jet pack jumps through to cloaks and smoke screens. The latter are more substantial, basically functioning like the commander abilities in the later Command & Conquer games. By which I mean, you can spend money to call in a very powerful ability that can turn the tide of an engagement. These include calling in massive Area of Effect strikes that deal a lot of damage, healing all units in a radius for some time and deploying extra units or a temporary turret. The trick that CA have been able to pull off, admittedly by copying the work that Ensemble did, is to make all of these actions control well despite being performed on a controller.
To put this in more detail, just think for a second about how you hold your controller. You’ve got two thumb-sticks, two triggers, some face buttons and some bonus buttons above each trigger alongside a D-Pad. The A button selects units, you can double tap to select all units of the same type, hold it to select all units in a modest radius and hit the right button above the analogue to select all units on the screen. You move and attack with X, use abilities with Y, call in abilities by holding the left trigger and selecting an ability with the analogue stick and that’s about it. So if you want to attack the enemy you select all your units, advance them forwards the enemy, then begin selecting specific unit types and having them perform abilities and focus on certain targets. As a bonus all units can shoot while moving, but most struggle to hit enemies behind them. As for the humble D-Pad, it lets you instantly switch between a few camera targets – namely between your bases, your unit groups and any units under attack. If that’s not good enough then you can hold down the button above the left trigger to swoosh around the camera at speed. I don’t normally time discussing the control scheme of a game, but I think it’s worth doing with Halo Wars 2 because it really does feel quite seamless and it works well even in frantic moments. This is the main issue with RTS games on console, namely that they control badly. With this rubicon crossed, Halo Wars 2 then successfully manages to keep things fairly simple with regards to it’s economy and base building. Essentially there are some spots where you can build a full base, which grants you multiple connected building slots tied to that base. So you can’t build anywhere, and instead are funnelled towards fighting over these potential base locations. The game also does a good job in handling the relative scarcity of these building slots, because each building can only produce one thing at a time. So you can’t just spam units, because you don’t have enough buildings to do so – instead you basically are pushed towards having a balanced collection of forces. This is then compounded by the relativity tight unit cap (units cost between 2 to 9 population and you have an initial max of 80 which can be expanded up to 140). Why this matters is simple, basically you always need to juggle units and never feel like you can’t manage this task – leading to a game that lets you focus on the strategy. If you only have the ability to produce 8 buildings, and you need at least 1 of each resource structure (for the two resource types) then you have to weigh up the pros and cons of your base. You will probably want an infantry building, a vehicle building and an air production building. Maybe you don’t want one of these, but what it does is make base building intuitive and a series of snap judgements – thereby removing the urge to turtle and reducing the complexity for new comers. Of course you can just spam barracks and infantry rush your way to victory, but this is a risky strategy that won’t serve noobs well.
Speaking of turtling, you can only get 4 turrets per base and each turret has to be optimised. By default they’re good-ish against infantry and OK against air units. Each turret can then be upgraded to be optimised against air units, infantry units, vehicles or be turned into an artillery platform. That’s it. Oh and if the HQ is destroyed, then all of it’s connecting structures are instantly destroyed. So defending your base is a risky plan at the best of times, thereby further encouraging an offensive play style. Now some might be put off by this, but honestly it serves the game well to focus so heavily on offensive engagements because it thrusts the player away from the typical noob trap which is to overly focus on defensive play. It also gives the game more of a fast paced feel, which makes for an enjoyable campaign experience. Speaking of which, the campaign has a good tempo (outside of a slow first mission) that does a solid job of expanding on each unit in the UNSC arsenal. Initially it does feel a bit like a glorified tutorial, but it quickly casts this off with skill and introduces a series of enjoyable and largely different missions. There are a couple of defence focused missions, some based around skilful control of a small number of units, some that restrict the units you can build but not the quantity and others that just let you play a big battle against the enemy. Ultimately these missions are pretty well balanced and there are fleetingly rare instances where it feels unfair, while still offering some challenge. Especially for those who are willing and able to complete the optional side objectives, some of which can be quite challenging indeed. These campaign missions also feature some further optional bonuses in the former of “campaign logs” which are your typical lore nuggets masquerading as side content, alongside the return of skulls from the mainline Halo games. These skulls can be activated on playthroughs of campaign missions (after they’ve beaten normally for the first time) and activate some bonuses, drawbacks or double-edged swords for the player. Some examples include +50% HP for player units, basic infantry explode on death to damage nearby enemy units and all player units take gradual damage over time. To unlock these skulls, you need to complete some of the side objectives in each mission.
And even if you don’t care about the unlocks, you’ll have to concede that Halo Wars 2 is a high quality game. Not only does the gameplay function well, with simple concepts and great controls allowing a range of depth almost equivalent to a great PC RTS game but everything surrounding the game is handled well. First and foremost the graphics are great, I played on my humble Xbone and even paired with a cheap older TV in my office everything looked good. There’s a nice range of colours, explosions pop, everything is readily readable at a glance and in game everything is handled well. Then there are multiple cinematic cutscenes, which also look great and manage to convey the plot well. Unlike some other games (cough Destiny cough) the plot is pretty straight forward and you don’t need to be an expert on the lore to keep track of what’s going on, sure the writing doesn’t have the campy charm of say Red Alert 2 but everything is good enough. The soundtrack is decent, nothing amazing but dynamically adjusts with the amount of action on screen and fits the soundscape of the Halo series. Finally the two factions themselves are similar but different enough that they’re both fun to play, without one necessarily being more overpowered than the other. It’s therefore a game where I can’t think of any significant flaws, sure some of the finisher moves that occur in combat with hero units can feel a touch cheesy but that’s not a real issue. The commander call-ins can be annoying when they’re used on you, but again you also get to call them in on the other player so it’s not a huge deal – especially as they’re quite expensive (especially in the early game) and have relatively long cooldowns. Halo Wars 2 is just one of those games that had a clear vision and delivers it without any issue, enabling casual players to have a bit of fun while loading enough content into the game for players who want a more meaty challenge.
Speaking of content, aside from the campaign which has a modest 12 missions that can be played in co-op (expandable with two DLC purchases that give you more) you’ve also got two other game modes. The first and most obvious is the skirmish mode, which can be played against bots or people or a mix of both. This mode has 3 rule-sets available within it. There’s the standard “destroy the enemy’s base” (deathmatch) mode, a control points mode (domination) where you and your opponent are both competing to hold 3 control points on the map and finally a “strongholds” mode. This one is basically a twist on deathmatch, as both players are competing to control as many bases as possible and have unlimited resources. Each skirmish match can be played with up to 6 players in total, split between a maximum of two teams. Alongside the skirmish and campaign modes is a “Blitz” mode, which is essentially a tweaked version of the domination mode above. There are a couple of gimmicks, with the central one being that each player has a deck of virtual cards that allow them to call in units and commander abilities. This is necessary as there are no bases, nor any way to purchase units or buildings normally. Instead you have a total of 4 cards in your “hand” at a time and can use one of these to deploy the corresponding unit or ability to anywhere that you have vision. Additionally this mode only has one resource called energy, which pays for all cards. You have a modest income stream throughout each match, but the main way to gather more resources is to attack “energy cores” which drop in randomly across the map. To make things more complicated, cards can have attributes – for example a unit might explode on death to deal damage or steal life from enemies while attacking them. This is then compounded by the fact that some cards are specific to certain commanders, so you can’t use the “Mac blast” (basically a big ass cannon blast) with any UNSC commander other than Isabel. Not only does this help make things slightly less convoluted for newcomers (as it means you can roughly expect what sort of BS will be deployed by each commander) but it serves to help the game’s monetisation. Which is obviously the main concern of the players. Basically you want good cards, because they’re more powerful and if you get duplicates of a card, then that card levels up and becomes more powerful. Now you do get a decent amount of cards just by playing the game, in my case I got around 24 card packs by beating all of the campaign missions, getting a few level ups (from the campaign mission XP) and playing the game across a few days (one pack per day). With that being said, I can imagine someone who really wanted to win might be tempted to buy a batch of say… 23 card packs for just under 15 pounds (apparently the most bundle at the time I checked). Again for context, both of the DLC packs combined cost as much as this “most popular” card bundle.
In spite of this somewhat questionable microneutralisation strategy, I do have to admit that the Blitz mode is cool and manages to be fast paced and even more streamlined than the base game. The control points are captured instantly, you can summon units from your hand anywhere (although they have -50% HP and damage for 8 seconds if deployed outside your base) and it’s just a quicker way to play the game. Which is a good thing, because a match that can last 12 minutes max is more appealing than say a MOBA match that can last anywhere from 30 to 180 minutes depending on how bogged down everything gets. One last mode I haven’t mentioned is the Firefight mode, because you need to own the DLCs, and I don’t. This makes it exceedingly hard to review, as I’m sure you can imagine.
In conclusion then, Halo Wars 2 is a pretty fun console RTS game with high production value and one case of questionable micro-transactions. The campaign is fun and does a good job of introducing the UNSC arsenal while having decent mission variety, even if it’s fairly short. As for the other modes, skirmish is solid even there aren’t that many rulesets on offer, while the Blitz mode is an even more streamlined version of the game. It’s just an all-round well made game and one that I can easily recommend to RTS fans and even those who are bad at RTS games but are looking for a good entry point.