Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is not an RTS for the faint of heart. Not because it’s overly complicated or difficult to play, but more due to the fact that this is an extensive package. You see, not only are you getting all of the content from the original game and it’s expansion pack, but you’re also getting additional content. As a result, getting through all the campaign scenarios took me around 50 hours. Which is quite a task, especially for more casual RTS players. On the other hand, those willing to embrace this game and deal with it’s drawbacks (such as a piddingly small max population) will have a good time. You’ve got a decent range of skirmish maps, plenty of campaign scenarios and of course a solid pool of civilizations to play as. Unlike it’s sequel, I’d argue that Age of Empires: Definitive Edition does a better job of making each civilization feel unique to play. This is because once you start hitting the higher tiers of units, buildings and upgrades you’ll notice there are a lot of distinguishing factors between these civilizations. If you want to play as the Romans for example, enjoy having weak archers, no fire ships, lame towers and so-so cavalry. Want to play as the Carthaginians? Well your standard sword units are hopeless and so are your siege units. You don’t get to have everything as any civilization, and I think this is a good thing.

Why do I think this? Well not only does it make each faction feel different and thus encourage strategy, but it also helps with the campaign scenarios. For me this is the meat of the game, and while a lot of missions can be a bit of a grind they are generally pretty fun and varied. As mentioned above, one nice aspect of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is the fact that you get access to the missions from the demos. These were hitherto semi-lost, as you’d need to seek out and get those demos running on more modern machines. Not only that, but these missions were also a bit of a mess sometimes and now they have been brought up to snuff. Ultimately there are over 60 campaign missions to play through, and they offer a decent level of challenge and do a good job of teaching you how to play the game properly. That’s not to say they’re all great, but the overall experience is pretty fun and has a nice difficulty curve to it.

As you’ll have noticed from the pictures, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is a pretty great visual upgrade over the base game. It’s not only the visuals that have been upgraded though, as there are myriad tweaks and changes under the hood to make everything more intuitive. You’ve got more hotkeys, the ability to automatically reseed farms, notifications when you can move to the next Age (essentially moving up to the next tier of the tech-tree), improvements to pathfinding, balancing tweaks, the ability to see technology trees while playing and a lot more. As a consequence, the Definitive Edition not only looks better – but more importantly it plays better too. Of course I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention one or two things that frustrated me to no end during my time with what I otherwise consider to be a stellar game.

The first issue I have, and one that everyone will encounter, is that the enemy AI is an odd beast. Hopeless at macro-level decisions such as what to build or where to attack, but utterly insufferable at the micro-level. Enemy archers and siege units do a fantastic job of dodging shots and otherwise making a pain of themselves, with endless little hit-and-run actions. If you try to snipe an AI villager or fishing ship, they will drag it out and do their best to avoid every shot or hit. In a game where villagers can quickly become some of the fastest units, this does make things a bit tedious when you are trying to focus on something. As the AI is a literal machine, they can send a dumb little diversionary attack, while using a priest to convert a unit, while queuing up more units, sending villagers to repair damaged buildings and more all at the same time. You on the other hand are a feeble assortment of flesh and bone, and will find the AI an irritating opponent at times. Fortunately it’s never too much of a struggle to outlast the AI, but my goodness can the near endless “you are under attack” notification sound become a source of frustration. The second big issue, which I think all players will also encounter is that improved path-finding is still deeply flawed. It’s no doubt better, but it’s still annoying to see your units clump up and get in each others way near constantly.

On the subject of annoyances, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition has a few that to it’s credit are authentic. You can’t build gates in walls, for example. Similarly fishing boats will gobble up all the fish at one point and then need to be explicitly told to go slightly further afield (or asea?) to get more. Generally speaking this a pretty faithful reproduction of the base game, with it’s strengths and some of it’s flaws being carried over. Want to build a big army in your campaign battle? Too bad, here’s 50 population which gets you 50 units split between economy, naval and ground forces (further split between infantry, archers, cavalry and siege units). I’m not mad about these decisions because after all, it’s a remaster and they were part of the base game. I just mention them because I imagine most people reading this (if anyone ever does) will be more familiar with Age of Empires 2/3/4. Which all let you build gates, have smarter villagers and have bigger armies.

And at this point I’ve kind of run out of things to say. I suppose I should quickly mention that the soundtrack is great and that the game is very fairly priced. Not only that, but it frequently goes on sale for around £3.74 or $4.99 yankee bucks and for that price it’s an easy recommendation from me. Not only does this game generally play great, but it has tons of content and a nice presentation. For existing fans of the series, this is either a faithful reproduction or the best introduction to where this series started. For RTS noobs, this is an easy to pickup and play game, although it doesn’t quite have the same appeal as some of it’s successors. Ultimately I would recommend this game to anyone, although I would recommend Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition first. If you enjoyed that game, then give this one a shot too. You might just be surprised how well it holds up. Just don’t let the AI’s micro GOD skills get you down.

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Quick Note: Yes this is a remaster of a remaster, Microsoft really did pull that stunt. For what it’s worth, you can’t buy Age of Empires 2: HD any more and all of the DLC for that version of the game has been included in Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition for free.

Oh Microsoft you cheeky swine, I’ve already bought 4 copies of Age of Empires 2 and yet here you are asking for me to buy it again. Were my purchases of the base game, the gold edition (with the expansions), the DS version and the initial HD remaster not enough for you? Evidently not, because here we are again and in spite of my better judgement I’ve gone and bought my 5th copy of this infernal game. Why did I do it? Well honestly because I waited years and then made a £4 impulse buy during the twitch event for the latest “hidden cup”. Which was fun to watch (except for the final) and so I felt like buying another version of the game for cheap wouldn’t be a terrible idea. I mean it has some new co-op maps, three new campaigns and uhhhh…. shiny graphics! Plus some Quality of Life (QoL) changes and some new civilizations. Oh and just under 300 CHEEVOS to gather, if you are so inclined. As it’s hard to review a remaster as opposed to the initial game, I’m just going to go through those points mentioned above one-by-one. If you haven’t played Age of Empires 2 for some reason, then just go grab when it’s on sale. Otherwise, read on!

To make things easy, let’s start off with the new campaigns which have been introduced for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. There are a grand total of three of them, with each campaign having 5 or 6 missions each. These missions are relatively varied and quite fun, although depending on your play-style they really can take a decent amount of time. Generally each campaign has sections where you have no villagers, and as such must make the most out of your modestly sized force. Alongside more traditional missions that let you play as per normal, albeit often with some restrictions. The most notable one is that in all of the campaigns, you aren’t allowed to just jump straight to the Imperial Age from mission one. Instead new tech and a larger population cap are gradually introduced over the length of each campaign. This is fine in principle, although in practice it means that you’ll often wrap up a campaign, start a new one and… oh we’re back to the Feudal Age with no villagers and a maximum population of 75. To be fair to these missions, you generally start with some units/structures already setup and often even some techs will have been researched (never had to research Loom for example). Regardless of the somewhat arbitrary limitations, the campaigns are all decently enjoyable and manage to feel varied enough that you’ll want to get through them all. Plus Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition has also reworked a bunch of the earlier campaigns from previous releases, including some balancing tweaks and an increased population cap for most of those campaign missions. Although it must be said, that the inclusion of the base game campaigns, expansion pack campaigns and then the DLC campaigns from AoE2:HD really does make the campaign menu a bit overwhelming at first.

Fortunately even if the campaign selection screen can be a bit overwhelming, the actual game isn’t. As mentioned before we now have SHINY NEW GRAPHICS (wow!!!), but honestly they are pretty shiny. Not only do we have new 4K resolution options, but there’s been a bunch of work done to make everything look more visually impressive even at 1080p. New building destruction animations, better zoom control functionality, new objects and effects for some buildings/units and the like are all included. As for the UI, it’s also been improved with the ability to see all faction traits alongside a real-time tracker which shows global production/research and also how many villagers are on each resource. There are also some relatively small gameplay tweaks like automatically re-seeding farms, the ability to rotate gates manually alongside a substantial improvement to the AI. Finally the soundtrack has been remastered, and some of the campaigns from Age of Empires 2: HD now have voice acting. Sure you don’t need much voice-acting, but it’s a nice little bonus and brings everything up to the same standard. Finally there are some more granular options in the menus, that let experienced players further control how the game operates. It’s basically a pretty extensive under-the-hood upgrade to the game, and it all adds up to make Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition the best way to play the game.

As for the multiplayer mode, aside from a new server hosting infrastructure and cross-play between Steam/Microsoft Store versions of the game, there’s some new content here too. First of all, there are now a batch of co-op scenario maps based on historic battles – just like those in Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition. While these don’t add a huge amount of content, it’s a nice addition and hopefully more are added in the future. There are also 4 new civilizations in the base game (Bulgarians, Lithuanians, Cumans and the Tartars) which can be played in Skirmish and Multiplayer modes. These new civilizations are a nice bonus and all have decent cavalry units, as would be expected for their history. The multiplayer mode also received a new game mode in the form of Empire Wars. This mode is quite similar to a normal game, but players now start in the Feudal Age and have a selection of pre-built units and buildings including around 27 villagers. It’s therefore a nice way to skip the initial Dark Ages slog and go straight to combat, although obviously this can be a headache for newer players or civilizations who benefit from a stronger economy in the very early game.

And that’s about “all” that’s been changed for Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. I guess it goes without saying that as it’s the new version of Age of Empires 2, there are also a bunch of new DLC updates that have added a bunch of extra civilizations/campaigns. But I don’t own them, so I can only judge the remaster on it’s own merits. Which honestly is enough for me to give it a recommendation. The gameplay changes to the campaigns are modest but appreciated. The new soundtrack is genuinely great and makes the game feel much more enjoyable to play. The new graphics likewise look great, and the myriad small tweaks do a solid job of making the game feel more modern. The new campaigns are fun, and generally this is just a great little remaster. If you have an older version of the game, there’s plenty of new content here to enjoy. If you’ve never played it, then be sure to give it a go!

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Quick Note: Firstly Zoo Tycoon 3 is just called Zoo Tycoon because historical revisionism is BASED. Secondly there are two versions available, the “Ultimate Animal Collection” and the base game. The base game, despite it’s name is actually cringe and you shouldn’t buy it. The ultimate animal collection adds a decent amount of content, has no build limitations on each map (i.e. you can build as much as you want) and once you’ve bought either version, you’re locked in so the marginally cheaper base game is a trap.

Zoo Tycoon 3 is another one of those Xbox One “exclusives” that are also available on PC, but which I’ve picked up for the glorious epoch defining Xbone because used copies are cheap and I like having physical discs. This initially made me uninterested in the game, because it had a bunch of DLC and I didn’t want to have to spend a lot of money on extra content that Microsoft will inevitably nuke at some indeterminable point in the future. Luckily for me and my fellow eccentrics, Microsoft decided to re-release the game with all of it’s extra content as “Zoo Tycoon: Ultimate Animal Collection”. This is version I’m looking at today and frankly thank God I waited because that build limit sounds like an absolute nightmare.

As for the game itself, it’s fun. Not ground breaking and arguably not even a good sequel, but considering the relatively niche that the game represents (or at least did before Zoo Tycoon imitators became a sub-genre of their own again) I was happy to blitz through the campaign missions over the span of a couple of days. These missions are generally pretty fun and have some unique twists, although I must confess that they do get a bit repetitive towards the end – especially with the DLC missions which don’t add anything new to the mix. The way these missions work are simple, you are given a small zoo that invariably sucks. It doesn’t have zoo keepers to keep the animals happy, it doesn’t have janitors to keep the feckless hairless apes from littering everywhere and often it doesn’t have animals in the right exhibits or toilets or something like that. So you start by zooming around, fixing all of the amateur mistakes and then need to start cracking on the mission objectives themselves. These often take the form of “raise zoo fame to X level” “keep the animals happy” “keep the guests happy” and sometimes interact with the new gimmick features this game has (more on that later). The gist for basically all of them is to stabilise the park, get profit rolling in and then purchase the right animals or just keep building up the zoo to tick the various mission checklists. It’s more fun than it sounds, but as mentioned the game isn’t ground breaking or revolutionary. Essentially you’re just playing a series of sandboxes, but with a somewhat strict timer attached to force you to spend money on the right things in generally the right order. Towards the end of the campaign, the game loves to hoist objectives on you that just take a lot of time so there’s some waiting involved which can be a tedious to be honest.

The other thing that’s tedious about this mode is the way that building things works in Zoo Tycoon 3. You see everything outside of a handful of basic structures – and I do mean basically everything – requires it to have been researched. You research it by trying to build the item and then being told you have to wait between 10 and 150 seconds for it to research (which costs money by the way) before you can build it. No, you can’t queue research so you need to say “I’d like to build a janitors office” and then wait a minute doing something else before you can build one – then realise you can’t build something else, so you need to wait for that to be researched. By the time you’re on mission 26 of 30, this starts to feel like padding because you’re researching the same things again and again and again like a medium Grasslands exhibit so you can have more than 3 antelopes. Why have more than 3? Because if there is less than 4, they get lonely and aren’t happy which means you are losing value from them. It also means they’re not happy, but they’re not real so moral qualms are an irrelevance. This might not sound like the spirit of the game, but you’re running a zoo for animals too dumb to survive so don’t blame the player blame the game. In this case the game is Zoo Tycoon 3 and it’s fun, but repetitive.

To alleviate the tedium, the game has a bunch of mechanics that are largely gimmicks but do make it great for kids and the young at heart. There’s a scrapbook (or was it snapshot album? Something like that) feature which encourages you to take cute pictures of every animal in the game. Then there’s the ability to make interactive exhibits for each animal enclosure, so that you can feed the elephants bananas or make silly faces with the chimpanzees or blast water at the rhinos. These are cute if insubstantial and I fear that a decent chunk of the development budget went towards these. The issue isn’t even that they’re not entertaining, but all animals act the same and the interactive mini-games are exceedingly shallow so if you’ve blasted a hippo with water blasting a rhino is the same experience. One last thing that’s slightly more worthwhile is the fact that you can breed your animals, which gives you a chance of getting an albino variant. This doesn’t do anything, but because Microsoft hates the achievement hunters it has spawned like poachers in the Serengeti you need every albino animal to get 100%. Oh and to have taken a picture of them too. There’s also the ability to release your animals to the the wild, which gives you some occasional notifications about how they’re doing great but otherwise doesn’t really do anything. I mean you get a slight boost to your Zoo’s fame, which is the main metric by which you unlock things (after researching them of course) but it’s barely a mechanic. You’re basically just selling them but instead of getting cash you get fame aka XP. The big fat main gimmick though is that you can switch from the overview mode, to a 3rd person mode and wander around your own Zoo. You can even drive a buggy around! No, you can’t run people over though.

Which brings to mind all the other little restricts that the game has undertaken to make everything appropriate for the kids. Even then, considering how morbid most fairy tales are (let alone the AI generated YouTube nightmares investing the platform) I can’t help but feel this is a little misguided. You can’t release the hungry hungry hippos by demolishing the fence for instance. In fact there’s no way to be anything but a benevolent zoo keeper, the game won’t let the animals hurt each other and you can’t starve them because they get swiped confiscated by less evil zookeepers. The whole thing is exceedingly twee and you’re never going to see a notification about how your released animal got killed by a fat dentist on safari. It’s not a big issue, but it also accompanies a big restriction in how much freedom you have. Because every exhibit has been pre-created, you can’t actually create a custom area for your animals – instead there are a selection of pre-made ones you are given the privilege of building. So if you want to make a sick custom lion exhibit then you can get the heck outta here. This means the game does feel kinda shallow, because you’re just slapping together various pre-made assets and outside of deciding where to place them you don’t get much say. To compound this issue, one of the main requirements guests have is that you have a good variety of animals. Which is understandable. But there are only just over a dozen species that can get in the main exhibits, with most animals being reskins of those (for example there are quite a few bears that uh… all have the same animations and needs and wants and dreams and aspirations). Most animals get shafted and are put in “mini-exhibits” which only allow between 2 and 3 (rarely 4) of them to be in a little fountain or patch of rock at a time. Can you customise these? Hahahaha NO!

So the meat of the game is less about running the Zoo you envisaged and more about the simulation of running a zoo. Or alternatively, of bumbling around your zoo like a dorky guest. Speaking of which, if you wander around for a bit you’ll notice that the various NPCs that are generated all have a handful of animations at most. Plus the skyboxes aren’t great. Which are small problems I admit and fully understand, but considering how neutered the zoo building is I think it’s a fair point to mention. I can only assume that you can’t build your own exhibits, or have a ton of different animals (like dinosaurs or aquatic life as per previous games in the series) because Zoo Tycoon 3 lets you bumble around the park in full 3D including Kinect support (WOW) with interactions instead of relying on one camera angle and sprite work. Which means that once the novelty of the gimmicks wear off, you’re relying on the core simulation aspect of Zoo Tycoon 3 to carry the experience. Alas the simulation is honestly pretty basic.

You see the way that Zoo Tycoon 3 tracks everything is basically just a simple balancing act. You have a “Zoo Fame” level (think of it like XP) which determines the variety of stuff you can buy. To get more XP, you build more things. These things cost money, but fortunately your XP increases the amount of guests visiting which generates more money. Therefore the more things you build, the more money you get to the point that you’d have to start seriously screwing around to actually lose money over time. The catch is that money trickles in, and I do mean trickles in. This is actually how the campaign missions provide their challenge, because the time limit only gives you so much time and therefore income to do everything that’s required of you. For more casual players though, this is an irrelevance. In fact it’s a total irrelevance because sandbox has no money worries at all. You just have infinite money. So the simulation is a total gongshow in the sandbox mode that most people actually care about. As for the campaign, well the money worries are only a factor because of the time limit. As for the rest of the simulation, you’ve got guest happiness and animal happiness. Guest happiness is a global value, represented as the accumulation of multiple factors such as entertainment, animal variety, bathroom availability, tidiness and so on. The problem with this though, is that it’s a global value. So if you have low bathroom happiness, you can build some bathrooms in the middle of nowhere and so long as they’re connected it doesn’t matter. Sure you’ll probably place them around the zoo in an attempt at roleplaying, but it doesn’t matter. Similarly if the tidiness if low, you just hire more janitors. Entertainment low? Build more entertainment buildings. So guest happiness is really just about keeping an eye on some meters that you can see at any time by holding down a trigger, and building whatever is needed. Keep the happiness high and people will keep coming, so you get money to buy things, to get more XP to unlock things, so you can build new things, to get more XP and then get more guests, who will want more bathrooms and so on. As for animal happiness, it’s global within the exhibit. So as long as you have a feeding machine, one interactive entertainment, one animal washer and the right habitat type plus the minimum number of animals to fulfil the social stat you’re all good. Now you do have to repair and restore the feeders and washers… unless you hire zoo keepers which you will, because otherwise it gets pretty tedious.

There are some other things you can faff around with, like advertising (which just increases the maximum amount of guest you can have over your XP allowance) and park research (which uses the same research timers so I never bothered with it) or you can optimise the prices of various things (which again I never bothered with because the defaults are fine and in sandbox you have infinite money anyway). Yet ultimately these can’t cover the cracks at the heart of the game’s simplistic simulation. So the sandbox is restricted, if appreciably good looking in 3rd person and the economy side is basically a sideshow. How can I then say I had fun? Well, the campaign missions are basically a series of light puzzles that encourage you to do all the various faffing. You’ll need to have X number of different animals, to interactive with the elephants and the chimps, to breed kangaroos and then take a picture of the baby, to do these while not letting any guest satisfaction bar drop below green and so on. It’s not an onerous challenge, but it’s still a satisfying one and trying to lay out my zoo with a tight budget and a tight deadline was often fun. Sure the sandbox mode is a let-down and everything else is a bit janky, but the campaign is still enjoyable at least as someone who only played the originals a little bit (I was too busy with Simcity 3000 and Warcraft 3).

So in conclusion, Zoo Tycoon 3 is a flawed game that struggles to compete with it’s predecessors which were made for far simpler hardware. Yet if you can overlook the game’s simplistic simulation and/or haven’t played the previous games much, it’s an enjoyable if shallow little tycoon game. Sure the sandbox is limited by having no economy, but to unlock things in the sandbox you need to play the campaign and challenge mode as otherwise your sandbox will be stuck at a low level forever. As such you need to play the other modes to get to relax in the sandbox, and these other modes provide a modest challenge and some variety. Plus the gimmicks are kind of nice, I mean the animals do look good and the photo mode and interactions are cute… at least for a while. As such I’d recommend Zoo Tycoon with two caveats. The first is that fans of the previous games will be disappointed. The second is that those who missed out on those games, will probably prefer them unless they are literally children. For those willing to give the shot on it’s own merits however, I can’t imagine that they won’t get a solid dozens out of the campaign and close to double that if they care about the challenge mode and want to play around with the sandbox side. Considering that the game is available on Gamepass or for a low price of around a tenner on disc (or Steam sale) it’s hard to recommend people avoid the game entirely. Just be aware that this is another example of a franchise who’s best days are far behind it.

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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.

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