Halo Wars 2 review
After seven long years, it was announced that in 2017, the much-loved console RTS; Halo Wars. Would be getting a sequel, much to the delight of fans. Finally, the cliff-hanger they’d been waiting years to find the answer to can be resolved. Halo Wars 2 was developed by Creative Assembly and 343 Industries, and published by Microsoft.
Halo Wars 2 is set roughly 28 years after the original. Serina, the AI from the first game has undergone final dispensation and we are told this in the opening cutscene. The Spirit of Fire has found itself drifting above a massive Forerunner structure. Seasoned Halo fans will recognise this as the Ark, which was mentioned at the end of Halo 2 and revealed in Halo 3. Much of the damage done to the ark during the main series has since been repaired, though there is a satisfying moment where you get to go past some wreckage from a Covenant ship and upon hearing mention of Master Chief, Jerome remarks about how happy he is that John is still around. Red team is deployed to investigate and in doing so discover Isabel, a UNSC Logistics AI, as well as the villain of the game, Atriox. After a tough battle Red team extracts with Isabel, though Alice is left behind and Douglas is badly wounded. In the next mission, we learn that Isabel has briefed the Spirit of Fire crew on what the Ark is and does, however this occurs off-screen. Which is a shame as I would have liked to have actually seen them reacting to the power available in the Ark and the realisation of what Atriox could do if he controlled such a powerful installation. This is a bit of a recurring problem with Halo Wars 2, a lot of the expositional dialogue is done off-screen and the player is left to imagine what they would have discussed. This is likely due to the fact that most Halo fans would have already played the games and looked at other media in the expanded universe, meaning they don’t really need an explanation as to what everything does, they already know. But any new player entering the franchise at this point will likely find themselves a little lost.
On the gameplay side of things, a few things have changed since the first game. There’s a new resource you need to gather in order to build units and use leader powers. Known as ‘Power’ you have to build generators at your base alongside the standard supply pads. Some fans of the first game saw this addition as unnecessary, as the previous game had no need of such a mechanic. Leader Powers are also changed, instead of gaining various bonuses to different stats and maybe having a hero unit like in the first game. In this sequel, every leader has a selection of different powers they can unlock using ‘Leader Points’ which are earned throughout the game. This helps give the Leaders a bit of a different feel from one another, rather than just ‘15% faster build speed and start with heavy supply pads’. However, this can lead to balance issues. For instance, when the first DLC leader, Kinsano, was released, it was discovered that she was much more effective than the other leaders, and while this was later addressed in a patch, this also brought to light another issue of the game. The patch sizes were massive. For people like me who bought the Ultimate Edition, we got a free leader every month for around 6 months, usually this would be a cause for celebration. But there was also the dread knowing that just after the leaders release there would be a 40gb patch waiting just around the corner. I can only imagine how owners of the standard addition must have felt. They didn’t get a leader each month, but still had to deal with these insane patch sizes. For people without unlimited broad-band, this would mean that it could have gotten quite pricey for them. Even with unlimited fibre broadband, it still took hours to download on my end.
Aside from massive patch sizes, the game had a number of other issues. Thankfully most of these were sorted out after betas were held to help identify problems with the game. However early on in the release I had to deal with crashes, enemies randomly teleporting my units out of the map where I couldn’t use them anymore. The UI is also sometimes a little unresponsive, no-where near as bad as it was in the beta thankfully, but it still can be annoying when you choose to build a structure and the game doesn’t register so. The pathfinding was mostly good though there were a few occasions where is seemed that the AI couldn’t figure out where it needed to move a unit if you had built a large army and were trying to move it through a narrow passage.
While these issues may put you off at first, Halo Wars 2 still manages to be a very fun RTS game, with a good selection of maps and 3 new themes released for the Blitz modes single map, to help keep it from getting stale. Speaking of Blitz mode, this is another instance where people take issue with the game. Blitz is essentially a game-mode wherein you use cards to summon units to a battlefield and try to fight off increasing amounts of enemies in different waves. You can make your cards stronger by opening packs and getting another of the same type of card from those packs. You probably already see where this is going. While these packs can be earned from Achievements, and while each DLC leader came with 5 special packs relating to them each. You can buy packs with real life money in order to make your army stronger faster. Thankfully this doesn’t affect any game-mode outside of Blitz, however, unlike Halo 5. There is no way to buy these packs with in game currency. Which means people who spend a lot of money, are going to have an advantage. Thankfully it’s a co-operative game-mode, rather than a competitive one. So, you won’t find yourself in a situation where you’re totally destroyed because someone had more money than you.
Overall Halo Wars 2 is a very fun RTS, the AI is good, using powers effectively and proving a real challenge even on normal difficulty and game-modes like Domination help keep the game fresh, rather then just constantly playing Deathmatch over and over again. The leader variety is good, especially if you have all the DLC leaders and the story is very interesting. While the large patch sizes and occasional issues with the gameplay can be somewhat annoying as well as the presence of the microtransactions. They don’t get in the way enough to be too much of a bother. In the end, I’d say it’s a very solid game and recommend it purely based on the amount of fun you’ll have with it. As a bonus, Halo Wars 2 is also available on the PC through the Windows Store, so if you don’t have an Xbox One, then you’ll still be able to enjoy it, if your PC is powerful enough to run it, that is.
If you would like to buy a copy of Halo Wars 2, then follow the link below:
Halo Wars 2 - PC
Halo Wars 2 is set roughly 28 years after the original. Serina, the AI from the first game has undergone final dispensation and we are told this in the opening cutscene. The Spirit of Fire has found itself drifting above a massive Forerunner structure. Seasoned Halo fans will recognise this as the Ark, which was mentioned at the end of Halo 2 and revealed in Halo 3. Much of the damage done to the ark during the main series has since been repaired, though there is a satisfying moment where you get to go past some wreckage from a Covenant ship and upon hearing mention of Master Chief, Jerome remarks about how happy he is that John is still around. Red team is deployed to investigate and in doing so discover Isabel, a UNSC Logistics AI, as well as the villain of the game, Atriox. After a tough battle Red team extracts with Isabel, though Alice is left behind and Douglas is badly wounded. In the next mission, we learn that Isabel has briefed the Spirit of Fire crew on what the Ark is and does, however this occurs off-screen. Which is a shame as I would have liked to have actually seen them reacting to the power available in the Ark and the realisation of what Atriox could do if he controlled such a powerful installation. This is a bit of a recurring problem with Halo Wars 2, a lot of the expositional dialogue is done off-screen and the player is left to imagine what they would have discussed. This is likely due to the fact that most Halo fans would have already played the games and looked at other media in the expanded universe, meaning they don’t really need an explanation as to what everything does, they already know. But any new player entering the franchise at this point will likely find themselves a little lost.
On the gameplay side of things, a few things have changed since the first game. There’s a new resource you need to gather in order to build units and use leader powers. Known as ‘Power’ you have to build generators at your base alongside the standard supply pads. Some fans of the first game saw this addition as unnecessary, as the previous game had no need of such a mechanic. Leader Powers are also changed, instead of gaining various bonuses to different stats and maybe having a hero unit like in the first game. In this sequel, every leader has a selection of different powers they can unlock using ‘Leader Points’ which are earned throughout the game. This helps give the Leaders a bit of a different feel from one another, rather than just ‘15% faster build speed and start with heavy supply pads’. However, this can lead to balance issues. For instance, when the first DLC leader, Kinsano, was released, it was discovered that she was much more effective than the other leaders, and while this was later addressed in a patch, this also brought to light another issue of the game. The patch sizes were massive. For people like me who bought the Ultimate Edition, we got a free leader every month for around 6 months, usually this would be a cause for celebration. But there was also the dread knowing that just after the leaders release there would be a 40gb patch waiting just around the corner. I can only imagine how owners of the standard addition must have felt. They didn’t get a leader each month, but still had to deal with these insane patch sizes. For people without unlimited broad-band, this would mean that it could have gotten quite pricey for them. Even with unlimited fibre broadband, it still took hours to download on my end.
Aside from massive patch sizes, the game had a number of other issues. Thankfully most of these were sorted out after betas were held to help identify problems with the game. However early on in the release I had to deal with crashes, enemies randomly teleporting my units out of the map where I couldn’t use them anymore. The UI is also sometimes a little unresponsive, no-where near as bad as it was in the beta thankfully, but it still can be annoying when you choose to build a structure and the game doesn’t register so. The pathfinding was mostly good though there were a few occasions where is seemed that the AI couldn’t figure out where it needed to move a unit if you had built a large army and were trying to move it through a narrow passage.
While these issues may put you off at first, Halo Wars 2 still manages to be a very fun RTS game, with a good selection of maps and 3 new themes released for the Blitz modes single map, to help keep it from getting stale. Speaking of Blitz mode, this is another instance where people take issue with the game. Blitz is essentially a game-mode wherein you use cards to summon units to a battlefield and try to fight off increasing amounts of enemies in different waves. You can make your cards stronger by opening packs and getting another of the same type of card from those packs. You probably already see where this is going. While these packs can be earned from Achievements, and while each DLC leader came with 5 special packs relating to them each. You can buy packs with real life money in order to make your army stronger faster. Thankfully this doesn’t affect any game-mode outside of Blitz, however, unlike Halo 5. There is no way to buy these packs with in game currency. Which means people who spend a lot of money, are going to have an advantage. Thankfully it’s a co-operative game-mode, rather than a competitive one. So, you won’t find yourself in a situation where you’re totally destroyed because someone had more money than you.
Overall Halo Wars 2 is a very fun RTS, the AI is good, using powers effectively and proving a real challenge even on normal difficulty and game-modes like Domination help keep the game fresh, rather then just constantly playing Deathmatch over and over again. The leader variety is good, especially if you have all the DLC leaders and the story is very interesting. While the large patch sizes and occasional issues with the gameplay can be somewhat annoying as well as the presence of the microtransactions. They don’t get in the way enough to be too much of a bother. In the end, I’d say it’s a very solid game and recommend it purely based on the amount of fun you’ll have with it. As a bonus, Halo Wars 2 is also available on the PC through the Windows Store, so if you don’t have an Xbox One, then you’ll still be able to enjoy it, if your PC is powerful enough to run it, that is.
If you would like to buy a copy of Halo Wars 2, then follow the link below:
Halo Wars 2 - PC
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