Halo Wars

Ensemble's last stand goes under our microscope.

	Version 360	Developer Ensemble	Publisher Microsoft	Genre RTS

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Units come in three familiar flavours - infantry, vehicles and aircraft - almost all of them ported lock, stock and barrel from the Halo shooters (the only omissions we noted were the Mongoose bikes). Each unit type can be upgraded two or three times via an appropriate facility: Scorpion Tanks can be equipped with murderous Cannister Shells, while you might prop a pair of rifle-toting Marines on the flanks of a Hornet fighter to ward off anti-air ground troops.

Some of these upgrades can be decisive. The iconic Warthog jeeps are glorified battering rams when you start out, but throw in a Gauss rifle turret and you've got a devastatingly cheap instrument of blitzkrieg. Likewise, bog-standard Marine squads can take a lot of punishment once you pimp them out with rocket-propelled grenades, a couple of extra men and a combat medic.

Leadership Powers, potent support abilities called in from the Spirit of Fire, are the game's wild cards. You can choose between three at a time in the campaign, accessed with D-pad up - the MAC blast flattens all but the hardiest of enemies and buildings, Pelican transports ferry key units around the battlefield, and Heal and Repair, er, heals and repairs. Each power bites an arm and a leg out of your resource stockpile and has a sizeable cooling off period, so it's advisable to exercise some restraint.

This being a console RTS, there's the potentially deal-breaking question of the control scheme and interface. Ensemble's, we're thankful to report, is almost flawless. The top-down perspective, rotatable with right stick, has its nose a bit too close to the ground for comfort, but the expandable mini-map prevents you from getting lost, and the D-pad offers a smart array of shortcuts to whisk you efficiently about the battlefield.

Even given an army of dozens, ordering your forces hither and thither is seldom fiddly. Tapping left bumper selects all your units, tapping right bumper selects all those on-screen, and holding A fattens out the cursor (locked in the centre of the screen) to cover small groups. Once selected, you can order a unit to move somewhere or attack something with X, and bust out secondary weapons (once recharged) by clicking Y over the unfortunate target.

There are scratches in the polish - the local select command has an annoying habit of settling on units which are marginally outside the view area, and we'd have appreciated the ability to assign teams, perhaps with a combination of left trigger and the face buttons - but on the whole this is a flexible, user-friendly substitute for keyboard and mouse. Right trigger lets you cycle between unit types in a selected group (indicated by icons along the bottom of the HUD) for micromanagement purposes.

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