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Halo wars 2 price1/20/2024 I played most of Halo Wars 2’s campaign on Xbox One, because PC code wasn’t available as early. The rest of the time, though, it’s just…dull, a procession of busy work and unit-marching that seems more intent on serving as a multiplayer tutorial (elaborately explaining each new unit type that’s unveiled across the course of the missions) than as a tightly-paced standalone campaign. Everything good about the game comes together here, with the “snapping” camera controls and unit grouping system working wonderfully, and they’re the only times the campaign feels truly exciting. Enemies attack down lanes, you have points on the map where you can build turrets, then you have to race around plugging the gaps in your defences with units. On these missions, where you’re tasked with defending a person or a base against waves of incoming bad guys, it’s a blast. There are some glorious exceptions though, a handful of missions where, perhaps realising where the strengths in both the game’s design and the licence lie, Halo Wars 2 gives up on the idea of this being a hollowed-out RTS and instead go for something closer to tower defence. Maps are small and cramped, so you rarely get a chance to try out tactics like flanking, and any strategies you could have developed around resources are nixed by the way the game handles them, since you simply construct the buildings that generate them inside your base. The most taxing things you’ll be asked to contemplate are which order you’ll construct buildings and when you’ll call down support powers (like ODST squads, which you can see dropping in below, and missile attacks), otherwise progression in the game usually consists of building a bunch of units then throwing them at the enemy. There’s a lot of real-time in Halo Wars 2, but not much strategy. The whole thing feels like a HD remake of a very old 90s RTS, the kind full of missions where you’d just walk a bunch of units from point to points lowly grinding past every enemy mob you encounter along the way. Sure, the controls get the job done, but they work in part because the game doesn’t ask much of them, with its linear missions and simplistic enemy encounters. Let’s start with Halo Wars 2’s centrepiece story mode which is, for the most part, a bore. It’s an impressive feat, but the joy is short-lived, because in order to get the game’s controls working, Halo Wars 2 - and in particular its campaign - has stripped the RTS a little too bare. (People playing this on PC will of course have a mouse and keyboard, but we’ll get to that later.) And I do mean that it’s a wonder to realise, not even five minutes after the game’s tutorial, that you’re sweeping the camera around, group selecting units and snapping back to bases and other armies with the flick of a button, just as you would if you had a mouse and keyboard. Here, within the confines of this game’s maps and demands, the Xbox One’s controller works almost flawlessly. Halo Wars 2 - and, credit where it’s due, the first Halo Wars - prove that’s not necessarily the case. Which is nicer than it sounds, because the biggest fear about real-time strategy games on a console, and the thing that generally keeps those games off the platforms in the first place, is that a control pad does not rank highly on the preferred methods of controlling an army quickly and accurately.
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