Halo Wars Preview
What's the game about: Before you "finish the fight" in Halo 3, you'll have to start it...20 years ago. Halo Wars, the real-time strategy take on the series, goes back two decades before the events of the first Halo. Despite a bird's-eye view of battlefield, the action's perfectly faithful to the source material: Grunts spray pink Needler needles, Elites fire Plasma Rifle beams, Warthog jeeps power-slide and bounce on suspensions with familiar physics...even a Ghost hovercraft's core dances around and explodes (complete with that high-pitch electric guitar riff), after the vehicle's taken out. The Marines even equip weapons accurate to the fiction's timeframe -- for example, the battle rifle (which fans pointed out should not have been in the original trailer) won't be around. The humans will be throwing grenades and firing assault rifles instead.
The controls are somewhat similar to other recent RTSes on consoles. You don't click and drag and draw boxes to select troops, and you don't use the minimap for jumping around the stage. But, as expected, you can do typical commands such as select all units of a type, jump straight to the home base, or bring up building queues. Halo Wars also has a large, circular cursor (brought up by holding down the A button) that you can drag across multiple units to "paint" select.
Everything else is pretty standard RTS fare: You collect resources (the game has three different types). You build units at your base and send them out to battle. Some units are better than others (in our demo, a team of Elites and Grunts wiped out all Marine infantry...until the machine-gun-wielding Warthogs came rolling in). And, as made popular in the Command & Conquer series, superpowers are available in limited capacity. In our demo, a Scarab was laying waste to all our human troops, but a MAC (magnetic acceleration cannon) blast from our orbiting Spirit of Fire ship (run by pre-Cortana A.I. "Serena") crushed the giant spider-mech.
What's new for E3: Hawks, Wolverines...Halo Wars has a zoo of new vehicles, all needed to help balance the game for real-time-strategy purposes. The Hawk is a new Marine plane, and the Wolverine is a Marine anti-aircraft tank...useful, of course, for dropping Covenant Banshees, since most of the other human units don't shoot upwards very well for gameplay-balance reasons.
What we like: Like most RTS games today, the little graphic details really set the mood. Besides the faithful nods to the source material, you'll see stuff like cranes and conveyor belts carrying crates underneath the base, or a drill sergeant looming over Marine trainees while they do push-ups behind the barracks. And the sound effects will instantly put all Halo fans in the right mood. All the original sound files from the Halo games are in Halo Wars (but tweaked for the different distances, naturally), so Needler shots sound like Needler shots.
What we dislike: The lack of info! Obviously, the humans and Covenant will be two of the playable sides (even though developer Ensemble Studios won't even confirm that at this point). During the campaign, the humans will meet up with the Flood, but no word yet on whether the parasites will be a playable race on their own (and no word about how the humans could have contact with the Flood here, 20 years before they supposedly had that first contact in Halo 1). Also, we hope to see infantry units using the power weapons from Halo. Snipers? Rocket troops? Ensemble won't confirm those, either, but it makes sense to us.
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Keine negative Äußerung zum Spiel - scheint doch was zu werden
