E3 2007 Preview
Ensemble Studios have certainly made a name for
themselves on PCs with their hugely successful Age of Empires games. However,
now the developer is setting their sights on consoles. This time around, they
are setting their sights on some pretty big game, tackling the beloved Halo
universe and modeling a console real-time strategy game after it. Those out
there who are worried about the games should fear, as the game will be very
faithful to the Halo franchise, and will have a streamlined control scheme that
will make the whole experience feel right at home on the Xbox 360. Scheduled for
a 2008 release, Halo Wars should do a fine job of bringing the series into new,
uncharted ground.
The storyline for Halo Wars will take place
twenty years before the original Halo, with the forces of Earth and the Covenant
amalgamation of alien planets locked in the middle of a huge interplanetary
conflict. The demo build was concerned primarily with the UNSC forces as they
used the familiar vehicles and weaponry that fans of the Halo series have come
to know and love.
Halo Wars has been in development for two and a
half years now, and the team at Ensemble have spend about six months of that
just working on the controls in order to ensure that they will be easily
adaptable for a wide range of console gamers. Selecting units will be done using
a combination of the A and X buttons, with A selecting your units and X
positioning them around the map.
You can hold down the A button to “paintbrush”
units on the field, moving the cursor over the ones that you want to select. If
you get too far from home, then the D-Pad will allow you to snap right back to
your base. Creating your vehicles is an easy matter of selecting the building to
create them and then selecting them in a circle menu.
The game will give you access to a ton of
vehicles and units from within the Halo universe, from infantry units to
Warthogs and Scorpions. There is a new vehicle, Orcs, which are basically
smaller fighter jet-style ships used for escort and attacking.
The E3 demo also gave some insight into the
battle elements of the game. On the jungle planet, Harvest, featured in the
demo, the player had a hundred units staging an attack on a Covenant base.
Warthogs would have the same physics as they would if you were actually driving
them in Halo, as they would fishtail and jump ravines just like you’d expect.
The smaller infantry units would get wasted by the enemy, but then larger
crafts, like Scorpions with huge missiles and anti-aircraft capabilities swept
in and begun shooting the banshees out of the sky and evening the odds.
However, the enemy seized this opportunity to
whip out their big guns, and unleashed the Scarab, a huge mechanical beast that
popped up and began frying the UNSC units by the boatload. A quickly placed
blast from an orbiting spacecraft put an end to this, and victory was achieved
by the UNSC side.
While not present in the demo, the developers
stated that Spartans would be a playable unit, but would not elaborate as to
whether or not we’d get an appearance from the big M.C. himself. The game will
also feature a co-op multiplayer mode when it releases in 2008.
