Oh Ensemble, you just made Peanut Butter Cups!

It's been awhile my friends and it's not that I don't love you all but I've had a busy busy few weeks! One thing i did get to do while I was away from the blogosphere was play Halo Wars, and despi trepion and legitimate and well placed apprehension, I found it to be a great blending of two storied franchises. Halo Wars comes to us from the good folks at Ensemble Studios, and is a RTS set in the now storied Halo Universe . While this wasn't the next Halo game I planned on playing (I'm really looking forward to that ODST game) but I was pleasantly surprised and actually happy with the game. Ensemble is the folks that brought us the incredible age of empire series, and they have very successfully pasted the Halo universe over their perfected RTS build.

Technically the stars of this game are Captain James Cutter, Sergeant John Forge and Professor Ellen Anders because they are the crew and hero of the forces you command but really the true stars of this game are the Spartans. In the ever expanding time line of the Halo universe, this game falls under that time slot before the destruction of most of the Spartan (the last of who is the Hero of the Halo series' Master Chief). They make an appearance 4 levels into the game and completely up the fun level of the game.

The story is, the aforementioned "main characters" are sent to investigate Covenant activity, and this, as in all Halo stories leads to a huge military campaign between the Covenant and the UNSC. Through battling on different planets, and gaining new forces throughout, as per the RTS make, they eventually coming into contact with the parasitic Flood (again a staple of the Halo Stories) and are forced to take an amazingly drastic suicidal step to containing the Flood and defeating the Covenant (if only for a little while). All this is nothing new to a Halo Vet, but this style of play may not be something most of the Halo crowd might not be familiar with. That being said, the control scheme is overwhelmingly intuitive and makes for a very enjoyable game. This isn't a port folks this game is tailor made to the XBOX 360 controller and it shines in this way.

The micromanagement of most RTS' has been placated, so those who come here looking for a hardcore experience will have to up the difficulty to get their monies worth, but for the casual gamer this is a great segue from either RTS to Halo or the other way around. I, being a fan of both, find this a great meshing of not only the two series, but the two genres. This is a good game, the online mode is as difficult as any other RTS because there are always gonna be kids as with any game, that spend an amazing amount of time getting good at this game, and I'd wait until this eventually gets ported to PC for lan style play, but overall it's a definite play. Maybe not a buy, depending on how you feel about RTS' but rent this, get a feel for it, and send me your gamertag :).

Thanks for reading folks and as always Be safe!