The 360 has never had a truly great real-time strategy game. Endwar was a brave but severely limited attempt to overcome the obvious control issues with voice commands, Command And Conquer Red Alert 3 proved competent, but basically inferior to its PC progenitor, with the controls again proving a hurdle not quite overcome, and the less said about Supreme Commander the better.

Halo Wars was designed, from its very inception, to be an RTS entirely friendly to the Xbox 360 format, with a workable control system at its core, and the spirit of Halo worn on its sleeve. And you know what? Ensemble seems to have largely cracked it. Halo Wars looks great – with truly exceptional graphics for the RTS genre – and handles and plays brilliantly, too. The campaign missions are oodles of fun from start to finish, and though the fun’s all in the ‘run and gun’ vein, with base building, maintenance and resource management kept to an absolute minimum to let you really let go and concentrate on swarming the Covenant with all you’ve got, it’s an approach that improves rather than undermines the experience, and makes it so very definitely Halo.

As an RTS, this battle-focused kind of approach that Ensemble is bringing to the table really shouldn’t work, but as we’d always gained an inkling of as we followed the developmental progress of Halo Wars, it somehow, almost magically, pulls the trick off perfectly. There’s a general expectation of at least some amount of depth in this genre. Even the light and fluffy Command And Conquer Red Alert 3 requires consideration of where you place your buildings, how quickly you gather resources and how carefully you balance your unit variety in order to stand a chance of penetrating the enemy’s line.

Halo Wars pretty much throws all that kind of thing out of the window entirely. The base comes like a big plastic Lego board, with slots on that you can place the half a dozen buildings available to you. The size of the whole thing can be increased with more slots, and each module can be upgraded (usually only once) to somehow make it better – twice the technology level for the reactor, a faster gathering of funds for the supply pad and so on.

The supply pad itself requires absolutely no more attention than simply being built – so upgrade it or build more, and you’re rolling in funds. Base defence, meanwhile, can only ever get as complicated as mounting one gun turret on each of the four corners of the base. These can be upgraded twice into enormous cannons, and kitted out with extra anti-infantry, anti-air and anti-vehicle plugins, too (all three at once on each gun, should you wish). This makes it perfectly feasible to just pull all your troops out of the base and leave it to its own devices while you go off marauding around the map, and there’s nothing more satisfying than hearing the announcement that your base is under attack, instinctively flicking back to check, and discovering that your turrets are already busily punching holes in all the attacking enemy units.

… continued