Combat Evolves

The Total War team are bringing Halo Wars 2 to PC. Can they bring something new to RTS multiplayer too?

- Samuel Roberts

The first Halo Wars never came to PC—and I’m not sure if we really missed out. That 2009 RTS was tailor-made for the Xbox 360, and it showed. Everything we would ordinarily recognize as real-time strategy was condensed to enable a greater emphasis on combat. Even the unit cap felt stingy—a reflection, perhaps, of the limitations of the hardware. On the platform that created the genre, an RTS made for consoles would never have been a Eight years later, however, we’re not exactly as rich with RTS games as we were in the ’90s and noughties. Ensemble, the studio that made the first Halo Wars, no longer exists. Outside of Relic’s reliable output and the omnipotent StarCraft II, you’ve got occasional outliers like Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak or Ashes of the Singularity but not much else going on in the traditional RTS scene. A second Halo Wars, this time made by Total War masters The Creative Assembly, is more of an enticing prospect.

The appeal of Halo Wars is in taking the vehicles, infantry and worlds of the Master Chief-starring FPS series and presenting it on a scale you could only get with an RTS. Halo Wars is to Halo what Empire at War was supposed to be to Star Wars or Battle for Middle earth was meant to be for Lord of the Rings: weapons-grade fan service.