“It’s fan service, definitely, but not ill-conceived or exploitative in any way.”

-games(TM) on Halo Wars, proving why game reviewers shouldn’t get ambitious.

Right, confession. I fucking hate Halo. Sure, it was an adequate shooter when it was released at the beginning of the millenium, but a steadfast refusal on Bungie’s part to improve anything aside from the graphics, and in the process allowing numerous glitches into the game, moved the franchise from 2001s adequate to 2004 mediocre and finally slid down the razor blade of sequel decay to 2007 fucking atrocious. At this point the only reason people buy the damn game is because the original Xbox is not exactly up to the multiplayer numbers people need to anonymously spam racial epithets over a headset.

So I’m a bit biased, is the roundabout point here. That and I don’t think Halo Wars is what the franchise needs (note that I hate the word “franchise” and I use it here because that’s the way it’s treated. An assembly line of cheap, crappy burgers that can be pawned off on a stupid public that should know better), seeing as strategy games like Command & Conquer have sold like 80-year-old ass on the 360.

And I really doubt there’s a teabagging button, which eliminates the rest of the reason you frat boys and 12-year-olds play this game. But I’ll be looking for it.

“One other major issue with the game is the horrible navigational map that just shows everything as a circle of cluttered brown mess… If you’ve played Starcraft or Command & Conquer, you’ve played Halo Wars… the game is so standard that it will never threaten to achieve greatness…. Co-op play is also included, but at the time of writing, it seems impossible to get one going… As I said, there are a only a few faults with the game… I personally wouldn’t pay sixty bucks for it, but I can’t say it’s bad.“

-Destructoid, displaying clear signs of schizophrenia.

And it’s time to start playing Halocraft. The tutorial doesn’t give you much to hope for this going beyond anything Blizzard did in 1996. The first level allows you to basically walk from place to place and let your troops do all the work for you, even on hard. And by the time the game gets to be a challenge, many levels later, any kind of excitement you might have gleaned from this title is gone.

Then again, holy shit! Music other than Halo’s signature generic synth military cadences.

Let’s start by justifying the title of Halocraft. Though there’s some attempts at making this all seem new, the only real addition to Warcraft 2 is ramp jumps and an alternate attack button. There’s nothing to address the typical pitfalls of the RTS genre, and those big action shots where everything’s moving? Those are fucking lies. You’re stuck, as usual, trying to juggle several units with a controller that was built for nothing more complex than controlling the massively repressed homosexual portagonists that Cliffy B. constantly cranks out. It didn’t work for the Command & Conquer games and it only approaches passable here.

Halo Wars has this crazy yin-yang quality, where it desperately wants you to love it and stares up at you with puppy dog eyes, but then you notice that it’s chewed up your furniture and you have to punt it over the kitchen counter. The cinematics are simply breathtaking, worthy of a standalone CG movie. The new team has taken Bungie’s tendancy toward uninteresting, dirty, and cramped psuedo-military designs and created something worthy of a sci-fi epic. There’s an excellent sense of design, animation, and music that come together to promise something that could have been another Star Trek 2.

Of course, the story is about as inspired as Halo stories usually are, which is where the kicking the puppy thing comes into play. The dialog is shit, the characters are mostly unlikable, and the story teeters around between making sense and having arbitrarily vague reasoning to push you into the next mission. There’s the gruff commander, who is actually the best-acted and most likable character. There’s the token hot Asian scientist lady, who isn’t quite hot because she has the token chip on her shoulder and a constant grimace that makes her look like she’s perpetually holding in a wet fart. There’s the hologram woman with the ever-tighter holo-outfit, here wearing a very thin impersonation of Lara Croft’s accent… and there’s the marine.

It was a nice idea, giving the ground units a bit of personality. And Nolan North is very much in demand as a voice actor after a stellar performance as the lead from Uncharted. But between this and the recent Prince of Persia, he’s been working with some very amateur scripts and honestly sounds like he’s phoning it in a bit. As the lead tough guy under your command, he’s a stock Sergeant Squarejaw teetering on the edge of being Captain Cliche. He’ll be constantly shouting how “this is the most fun I’ve had all day!” and other lines that are barely elevated above the “hoo-rah!” that your marines shout every single fucking time you issue an order. Which, in RTS games, is constantly.

Really now. “Hoo-rah”? Did you think that was going to remain viable after the fiftieth time in one mission? It’s like I’m commanding a platoon of heavily armed 14-year-olds who are playing make believe.

Another thing to note about Halo Wars’ amazing visuals is that they’re uneven. The terrain can go from bland to phenomenal. And your ground troops look like little plastic Army Men. The in-game detail all orbits somewhere around the level of just above adequate, on average.

“Though it’s not a first-person shooter, Halo Wars packs all the Halo fixings you’ve come to expect: an engaging campaign, co-op play, engrossing multiplayer, efficient party-friendly matchmaking, hidden skulls, Legendary difficulty, and impeccable controls.”

-Official Xbox Magazine, either desperate to keep their licensing money or high on powerful cocaine.

I’d go into detail about how much crap the auto-map can eat, but just trust me when I say that you might as well be navigating a map of your own lower intestine. That’s what it looks like, and the markers just don’t help, at all. They’re either too small or a similar color to the background.

All of this would have been survivable if the game had thrown anything new at the player, content-wise. It doesn’t. Zerg rushes, resource stockpiling, base-building, mono-button upgrades, escort missions, inching across maps to arrive at the place you’re supposed to defend too late, two sides with few options makes multiplayer a really predictable affair…

There’s some good stuff. What looks like a trip through the same damn terrain as any other RTS occasionally makes way to beautiful future cityscapes. There is more personality than most RTSes… okay, the ones from the mid-90s, again. But every time you want to pet the dog, you just have to kick it. Again. Until it fucking dies.

“It’s the best RTS on the Xbox 360. Though this isn’t stating much, any forthcoming RTS will undoubtedly have to compare to Halo Wars in the future.”

-Planet Xbox 360, after having won the Special Olympics.