Halo, with three phenomenally successful First Person Shooters to its name is synonymous with the Microsoft Xbox and Xbox 360 brand. Eager to capitalise even further on this success, Microsoft bought game developer Ensemble Studios of Age of Empires fame and put them to work developing a Real Time Strategy (RTS) set in the Halo universe. The product of Ensemble's hard work is Halo Wars and for their efforts, Microsoft closed them down. Go figure.

The style, interface, visuals and sound design will be immediately familiar to fans of the Halo series. This is not just a quick cash-in on the Halo intellectual property. Painstaking effort has obviously been taken to ensure that all aspects of the game are true to the Halo universe. Everything looks, sounds and moves exactly as you would expect it to. Ensemble Studios have done a brilliant job with the design of Halo Wars and Bungie can rest assured that the integrity of their baby (well their baby that they sold to Microsoft like an African child to Madonna) has been maintained.

Halo Wars is set 20 years prior to the events of the first Halo game in a time when the Master Chief still had some Spartan buddies around. I recommend that you read the novel The Fall of Reach by Eric Nylund if you are interested in Halo lore and want to fill in more of the back story. Halo Wars begins on the planet Harvest which the human race has just won back after a long and bloody conflict with the Covenant. During a recon mission, the main character SGT Forge discovers the Covenant Arbiter exploring Forerunner ruins on Harvest. The game follows the ensuing action as a protracted battle rages across some truly varied and exotic locations on the way to an explosive finale.

The single player campaign is of a decent length and can be played cooperatively via both Xbox Live or System-Link. The campaign introduces players gradually to the finer points of the game and manages to keeps the action ramped up through to the end. Missions have primary and optional objective as well as hidden items to encourage multiple play throughs. The campaign is only played from the Human point of view which is a shame as a Covenant campaign would have been a welcome addition. You can play as the Covenant in skirmish and multiplayer matches however it may take some time to get used to the Covenant differences without the practice of a long campaign under your belt.

Halo Wars is what I would call a ‘traditional' RTS in the sense that it is viewed from an overhead perspective with the ability to rotate and slightly zoom the camera. The game has been designed from the ground up to be played on the Xbox 360 and for that reason certain aspects of the common RTS formula have been streamlined to suit the console. Without the use of a mouse and keyboard, the complexity of a games control scheme is limited by the consoles hardware. Ubisoft got around this with a brilliant voice command system in Tom Clancy's End War but don't expect a similar system in Halo Wars.

Instead, all commands in Halo Wars are carried out with the Xbox 360 controller. The face buttons perform most context sensitive actions such as move and attack whilst the left are right bumpers are used for quickly selecting either all units on the screen or all units in play. It is possible to select all of a particular type of unit or to drag a cursor over a selection of units. More advanced features such as creating ‘hot-key' custom groups or setting patrols are not possible. For die hard RTS fans, this may sound like a big omission but in reality you learn to live without it.

Camera control is handled by the thumb sticks and it is possible to scroll at quadruple speed with a left trigger pull or jump between bases and units with D-pad and trigger combinations. The controls do take a little getting used to but you will soon be surprised by your dexterity and ability to navigate the game world once you get the hang of it. Personally I do not think that you could improve much on the Halo Wars control scheme for a RTS on the 360 without going down the path of voice recognition. Some considerable thought and play-testing obviously went into the development of the games controls.

Halo Wars is a base-building RTS. Build sites are in limited supply and visible to all players from the get go. Sometimes these sites are clear, other times they are occupied by a small group of rebels which will need to be dispatched before you can build on them. On some maps, certain structures can be claimed by infantry which afford the player appropriate bonuses such as elevated firing positions, force fields or additional power generators.

The currency of Halo Wars is supplies and power. The more supply pads or warehouses you construct, the faster your supplies build up. The more power generators you construct or capture, the more high-level technology and upgrades become available. Supply crates are also scattered around the map which give you a temporary supply boost but you do not have to worry about protecting far off resources as they are generated from within the confines of your bases.

Bases are modular and consist of a central hub surrounded by a number of build sites for supporting structures. The number of available build sites can be increased by upgrading the central hub. Build sites can be populated with any combination of a number of different structures. These structures perform, resource gathering, tech enabling, tech researching or unit building functions. Additionally bases have sites for up to four automated defensive turrets for added defence.

Restricting players to a maximum number of structures per base is a brilliant concept as it forces you to commit to a particular tactic or tactics. If you want many different types of units you will need to sacrifice space for resource gathering, meaning you will build units more slowly. If you want to rush you can build lots of resource gathering structures but this will limit your ability to counter a switched on opponent. Obviously building multiple bases as soon as possible is a good idea but resources spent on base building are not spent on units which may leave you temporarily vulnerable.

In multiplayer and skirmish matches, players have a choice of one of three Human or three Covenant leaders. Each leader has unique units, powers and bonuses. The Covenant leaders differ from the Humans as they themselves appear on the battlefield as powerful individual units. Each Covenant leader has a devastating attack that costs very little resources to initiate but a constant supply of resources to maintain. Where Human players may rush early on with cheap units, expect Covenant players to rapidly gather resources and attack with their leaders.

There are powerful units in Halo Wars but nothing is indestructible or without weakness. You can quickly build units for a rush tactic but a smart opponent will see this coming, defend accordingly and counter-attack. The matchmaking system whilst not containing a region filter seems to find local games far more often than other games such as Gears of War 2. What is does have is information on exactly how many people are currently playing each game type. This allows you to choose a currently popular game type that will improve your odds of finding a game. This feature was sorely lacking from Tom Clancy's End War in which you can be waiting for a match for what seems like (and in some cases was) forever.

Any RTS fan will know that in order for a RTS to succeed, two very important things must be achieved. Firstly, the units within the game must be balanced. Nothing will kill a RTS faster than cheap tactics stemming from poorly balanced units. Secondly, the heart and soul of an RTS is found online. If the matchmaking system and size of the online community are not up to scratch, the game is bound to fail. Fortunately, Halo Wars ticks these two very important boxes and sets itself up for a relatively long Xbox Live lifespan.

For those of you without Xbox Live, Halo Wars offers an offline skirmish mode with or against AI controlled players. As with online multiplayer matches, games can be 1v1, 2v2 or 3v3 team or death match (all against all). If you have the ability to locally network with other Xbox 360s you can play skirmish or the campaign cooperatively via system link. Even though Halo Wars really comes into its own on Xbox Live, there is enough offline content to warrant a purchase. If you do have Xbox Live and are still sitting on the fence, there is a Halo Wars demo available on the Xbox Live Marketplace to download.