Gameplay should feel very familiar to any who played the original game. The maps, of which I only saw two during my time with the beta, seemed a little bland in design but they still had plenty of points of interest and interaction scattered about. All of the units are animated wonderfully and they show quite a bit of personality as they go about attacking, capturing or simply standing still. The game looks great, there is a clear attention to detail from Creative Assembly’s artists and graphical designers. The game uses lots of radial menus and simplified placements to enable the less precise movement of a thumb stick to work, allowing access to lots of different options without excess frustration.
Sadly, though I still found myself itching to use a mouse but I am happy to admit that could simply be because I am a stubborn old gamer who is unwilling to change. I was immediately impressed by how well the developers (Creative Assembly this time around) have managed to make the controller a viable control scheme. Unfortunately, the beta I have been playing (a part of Microsoft’s E3 week) was only available on the Xbox One so it was controller time once again. What is even more welcome is the sequel is coming to PC so I will be finally able to play it with a mouse. I must admit it is a surprise to see Microsoft releasing a sequel. In the end, it became a fondly remembered game but one that didn’t set the world on fire. In my time with the game I enjoyed what it had to offer but being a lifelong RTS gamer I always found myself wishing for a mouse to play with. It tied that new control scheme to an entertaining campaign featuring all the classic units from the Halo universe. It simplified building and infantry management so using a controller wasn’t a nightmare. The original Halo Wars, while not a classic, was an excellent attempt at getting the traditionally mouse heavy genre of RTS working on the console.
To do that they have chosen to lean on something they know very well and that is Halo. But with the success of the Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology HD releases as well as titles such as Act of Aggression gaining popularity Microsoft has decided the time is right to dive back into the genre.
For the longest time Starcraft 2 seemed to be waving the banner for the genre being the only title of note. The ye old days of the classic RTS seemed to be long gone.
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