Rekindling The Spirit Of Fire In Halo Wars 2

Where the first Halo Wars was a fairly cautious entry into the Halo fiction, steering clear of the first trilogy of Master Chief led games, Halo Wars 2 has no such qualms about adding to the modern Halo era. The story sees the Spirit of Fire and what’s left of her crew thrust straight back into the heart of the action, facing off against a whole new foe called the Banished and the awesomely powerful Brute, Atriox.

They’ve been dragged 28 years forward in time, during which the crew were kept in cryosleep, and that disparity sees them struggling to piece together where they are and what’s going on, as they investigate the Ark. It digs up the Hollywood trope of Japanese soldiers left isolated on Pacific island outposts for decades, not realising that the Second World War had ended, and the comms chat is full of confusion. That doesn’t last long when they come into contact with the Banished and, one rousing speech later, decide to tackle this emerging threat to mankind and the races of the Milky Way. Such recklessness will likely see him given both a court martial and a commendation should they return to Earth.

With just one old ship, they should be hopelessly outmatched, but I have a feeling these plucky underdogs will win the day. Ascension, the third mission in the story, sees one of the first real strikes at the heart of the Banished operations. There are echoes of Halo: Combat Evolved, as you try to reach the Ark’s Cartographer installation. It’s a fairly straightforward mission, as you first explore the area, set up the simplistic forward bases, and then have to capture and hold a handful of control points from the steady stream of Banished forces. Trickier missions can come later, but this makes it perfect to spot the tweaks to the original Halo Wars’ very successful console RTS formula.

The Xbox One controls are largely the same, with camera control on the two analogue sticks, issuing commands and selecting specific units on the face buttons, the ability to select all units and all visible units, and so on. There are some minor tweaks though. Double tapping the right bumper is now used for all units, letting the left bumper be used for speeding up the camera.

The right trigger, meanwhile, is now a modifier key, letting you create up to four command groups and opening up more strategic options to you. They’re simple but effective changes on a controller, and help bring the flexibility closer to playing with mouse and keyboard on PC. Of course, the game is also coming to PC, with its streamlined strategy gameplay a great fit there as well.

Halo Wars 2 keeps the same fast and fluid pace as its predecessor, and looks quite gorgeous as it does so. There’s a lot more foliage and detail in the game world, as you’d expect, and there’s things like the downwash from the Hornet VTOLs or the way that a Hellbringer’s flames lick and catch on whatever they’re burning.

It’s very easy to just build a ton of units and send them wandering into a fight, but underneath this compulsion lies the usual rock, paper, scissors formula, with one type of unit being able to counter another. Sticking with the previous examples, Hornets are good at churning out bullets on a single target, but they can be overwhelmed by troops, but then Hellbringers excel at clearing out units in fortified towers, and are poorly equipped to deal with attacks from the air.

Of course, it will be much later in the campaign and when you take the game online that these kinds of strengths and weaknesses will really pan out, with the full array of units and upgrades at your disposal. Time is of the essence as you try to build up your forces, branch out and capture power nodes and found other bases, while probing and looking for a weakness in the enemy.

Playing 3v3, I was rescued on several occasions by my neighbours before we were able to build the most powerful units in the game – the Condor gunship and the Scarab, each of which use 40 points of your unit cap – we then proceeded to roll through the opposition bases. Domination was a whole other story, as despite an early lead, they were building up a huge force that easily dominated the middle of the map and kept us pinned back.

However, Creative Assembly have worked to create something new, something even faster and more fluid to play. Blitz is just that, stripping away base building in favour of smaller maps, control points to capture and hold, and using energy to buy units and abilities from your deck of cards. Yes, cards are something of an overused trope in the last few years of gaming, but it works rather well here, giving something that’s easy to pick up and play, but with depth for those that want to find it. It’s this mode that will be the focus of this weekend’s beta test.

Building your deck is simple enough, picking twelve cards that can be units, special variants of units or Leader Powers to call in on the battlefield. They all have energy values, and as you play, you either earn energy from holding control points or from destroying and collecting the pods that periodically appear on the battlefield. Summoning units is done from a random selection of four cards from your deck, which can crop up multiple times, and they can be spawned anywhere on the battlefield you can see, the only problem is that they spawn at half health if done outside your main spawn point.

It’s up to 3v3 players, but playing a simple 1v1, you need to move quickly. There’s a fairly small points limit that keeps games down to less than ten minutes, and you need to be constantly tussling to control two if not all three of the control points. A match can quickly get away from you if you’re not careful.

Creative Assembly know not to mess too heavily with the console-friendly formula, but minor tweaks here and there are good to see, and fans of the original will doubtless enjoy the original crew’s return. The biggest addition is Blitz, and it’s certainly a very interesting mode, and we’ll be looking at it in greater depth after playing in the beta starting this weekend, but as a whole, Halo Wars 2 is feeling like a great sequel to the landmark console strategy original.

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