Halo wars 2 test: Halo Wars 2 (for PC) Review — Mitspielen — Vampire Live in München

Halo Wars 2 (for PC) Review

The $59.99 Halo Wars 2 is a real-time strategy game set within Microsoft’s insanely popular Halo universe. Utilizing a rock-paper-scissors-styled combat system, Halo Wars 2 tasks you with developing bases and armies to combat legions of Covenant-offshoot troops called The Banished. The game keeps things simple: Once you familiarize yourself with your units and resource production, it’s just a matter of building the right troops for the job at hand, whether that means capturing enemy bases, defending your own base, or surviving waves of enemies. Halo Wars 2’s simple design makes the RTS experience accessible for both newcomers and veterans, but the game doesn’t do much to invigorate the genre besides adding the e-sports-styled Blitz capture mode. It’s also available on Xbox One ($200.00 at eBay)(Opens in a new window) , courtesy of Xbox Play Anywhere.

Splinters of War

Halo Wars 2’s sci-fi tale is set roughly 30 years after the first Halo Wars and shortly after Halo 5 ($0. 00 at Microsoft Store)(Opens in a new window) . The human-piloted Spirit of Fire warship emerges from stasis only to encounter a massive Covenant splinter faction known as The Banished. Led by a brutish space ape named Atriox, The Banished has amassed a tremendous amount of power and technology, and is poised to strike. As the Spirit of Fire’s commander, you must squash The Banished before it can threaten humanity.

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Halo Wars 2’s story unfolds through beautiful CG scenes that complement the game’s mission structure. A briefing before each combat situation further expounds upon the scenario you’re about to play through. Unfortunately, the plot is fairly shallow. There are no major revelations aside from some shoehorned backstory elements. Perhaps this was deliberate, so as not to alienate fans of the mainline series, but the CG scenes are little more than fluff designed to hype you for the next skirmish.

Halo Wars 2 (for PC)

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Command and Conquer

Some story missions have you defend your base from an onslaught of enemy hordes, while others urge you to capture a base, and others still require that you escort key units across the map to your objective. In all scenarios, however, you want to start amassing resources and building your army.

Why You Should Game on a PC

Halo Wars 2 has two resources you must manage in order to manufacture units: supplies and energy. These are scattered around the map or hidden within caches, and they’re always worth picking up when you come across some. Once you have enough resources to build a base, you can invest in a supply depot and generator, both of which generate these resources over time. With a steady stream of energy and supplies, you can crank out fighting units.

Halo Wars 2 differs from other RTS games, such as StarCraft II ($42.00 at Amazon)(Opens in a new window) or Total War, in that the resource management is automated and highly streamlined. Once you establish a base, you devote considerably less time towards earning and managing resources, giving you more time to micromanage your troops and keep your head in the action. This is a boon for new players who would otherwise feel overwhelmed by the amount of development and management required in other games. At the same time, the oversimplification of these systems lessens the strategic importance of development, which is usually a core element in RTS games. You don’t need to commit workers to mining and refining as you would in StarCraft, or building cities and political standing as you would in Total War. In Halo Wars 2, you simply construct supply depots and generators, and discover resources on the map to get your army going.

Combat units operate under rock-paper-scissors rules, so they are strong against one type of attack, but weak against another. Basic marines are all-purpose soldiers who are effective against aerial units, but highly vulnerable to ground-based vehicles. Conversely, aircraft can tear vehicles to shreds, but they can be shot down easily by a cluster of basic marines. As you play through the campaign, new and more-specialized units are introduced, which adds nuance to your troop management. For example, Cyclops units are excellent ground-based anti-vehicle soldiers, but they have zero anti-air attacks and are extremely vulnerable to aircraft fire. If you find yourself in need of anti-vehicle units, you can opt to create some and roll them out alongside basic marines, or you can build a Hornet instead and have that escort your marines for support.

Halo Wars 2 (for PC)

Combat scenarios are reactive, so you want to build units to counter whatever your enemy throws at you at any given time. Because of the relatively simple rules, decision-making is snappy and the combat is fast paced. As you dive deeper into the game, you’ll need to organize your units into squads to handle specific tasks across multiple points on the map. This is about as complex as Halo Wars 2 ever gets. So long as you have the right unit for the job, you should have no trouble handling whatever The Banished throws at you.

The downside is that it is all too easy to build units and send them straight to the meat grinder, especially when resource production gets high. The All Units function lets you issue orders to every combat unit on the field, so if you ever feel overwhelmed you can play this trump card and have your entire army pull your butt out of the fire. Only during a handful of scenarios is this not a viable option.

Later maps are riddled with hazards and mines that can destroy hapless infantry or vehicles as they plow towards your mark during an All Units summon. Likewise, it’s all too easy to accidentally pull your troops to a position and leave key areas and choke points unprotected. But in a pinch the option is there, and it is surprisingly effective, which somewhat cheapens Halo Wars 2’s strategic elements.

Controlling the Chaos

As a console-oriented RTS game, Halo Wars 2 makes great use of gamepad inputs to give you as much control over the field as possible. D-pad shortcuts let you cycle between special groups you assign to the button, general units on the field, or to bases you have erected, giving you quick access to your soldiers and key points with only a few button presses. Once you acclimate to the controls, they work very well. That said, if you play Halo Wars 2 on PC there is no reason to use a controller at all, since the keyboard and mouse controls are faster and feel more natural.

Unfortunately, Halo Wars 2 has a few AI kinks that can make things slightly more difficult. I often found that units get hung up or stop moving if there are obstacles between them and their target. You see, the AI is scripted to take the shortest path possible towards a target, and anything that gets in its way can screw up its pathing and waste precious time or destroy the unit. At other times, I noticed that some units didn’t respond to my commands. This is particularly frustrating when multiple skirmishes break out across the map and issued orders fail to execute. These scenarios are few and far between, but they seem to happen at least once during a mission.

Enemy AI is no stranger to odd hiccups, either. It can be stupidly aggressive at times, often rushing to its death in droves. At other times it’s bizarrely passive. During one mission, my bases were under assault from a massive Scarab walking tank. After crushing my installation on the coast, the mechanical beast made its way towards my main base and stopped, for seemingly no reason. I managed to build an army of anti-vehicle units to tackle the Scarab as it napped, earning me a cheap, easy victory.

Halo Wars 2 (for PC)

Playing Nice With Others

Aside from the campaign, Halo Wars 2 offers several multiplayer options that let you play cooperatively or competitively. Skirmish mode pits you against AI opponents and can be played cooperatively with other people. One-on-one, two-on-two, and three-on-three multiplayer modes are a rush to collect and control resources as you compete against another team. The speedy nature of the gameplay encourages you to build up your resources as fast as possible in order to take your opponents’ bases. One-versus-one matches usually end within 10 minutes or so, but playing in teams extends a match’s length.

Blitz, on the other hand, is an entirely new competitive mode, and it strikes me as Halo Wars 2’s attempt at a competitive e-sports game. Rather than building your base, you go into a match with a deck of cards you build from packs you collect during the campaign and other game modes. Your card deck is what determines which units you can summon onto your starting zone. You spend energy to play these cards, which you accrue over time, or by claiming energy cores that spawn randomly on the map. The object of Blitz is to take control of zones on the field to earn points. You only earn points if you control a majority of the zones on the map, so you want to claim energy and play your cards as effectively as possible to earn the win. The first player to get to 200 points wins the match. Like the other Halo Wars 2 game modes, Blitz uses the same rock-paper-scissors gameplay, giving matches just enough depth to be satisfying without feeling overly complicated. The mode is energetic and extremely fun, though whether it catches on in popularity after launch remains to be seen.

The Gears of Warfare

Halo Wars 2 is a nice-looking game, but it is not a visual powerhouse. Since the game utilizes a top-down perspective, you won’t zoom in to admire the character models very often. Each character model is clearly discernable from the others, however, and the animations are flashy and eye-catching.

I didn’t experience any major video issues, though I did encounter the occasional stuttering while playing Halo Wars 2 on my Nvidia GeForce GTX 970-powered gaming desktop. One particularly nasty incident slowed my game to a crawl, with the action chugging down to one frame per second. I suspect that the latter freeze was a crash of some sort, or a stroke of bad luck. After scaling back the visuals, I noticed that the game suffered from less stuttering. Halo Wars 2 is not a graphically intense game, but dropping a few settings to medium alleviated the matter in my case.

In addition, Halo Wars 2 would sometimes display failed objectives from a previous mission at the start of a new match. And, as mentioned earlier, the AI is temperamental at times, with both ally and enemy units alike ignoring orders, running in circles, or simply stopping for no good reason. Hopefully, 343 Industries and Creative Assembly, the development teams, will release a patch in the near future to remedy these woes.

Simple Strats

Halo Wars 2 is a fast-paced and action-heavy RTS that doesn’t bring anything new to the table, but it’s enjoyable for what it offers. Sometimes you want to settle down with a game that’s familiar and easy to enjoy, and that is exactly what Halo Wars 2 offers. If you’re looking for a casual, laid back RTS game, and can overlook a few graphical and AI hiccups, Halo Wars 2 is the title to keep you plotting and scheming well into the wee hours of the night. Hardcore RTS fans should stick with the PCMag Editors’ Choice award-winning StarCraft II.

Halo Wars 2 (for PC)

Pros

Accessible, strategic gameplay using a rock-paper-scissors metaphor.
Simple, streamlined controls.
Terrific CG scenes and voice acting.

Cons

Unit AI can be finicky and unresponsive at times.
Shallow story.
Occasional graphical glitches and stuttering during testing.

The Bottom Line

Halo Wars 2 is an RTS for the layman. Easy-to-learn mechanics and basic micromanagement keep the game interesting and engaging, but it lacks the strategic depth to keep hardcore RTS fans invested for long.

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Halo Wars 2 single-player review: Meet local units in your area

Enlarge / The tight camera angles at least show off some very intricate art design.

There are two extremely promising plot threads running through Halo Wars 2‘s main campaign. The first is that the surprisingly tight-knit (for a real-time strategy game) cast from the first Halo Wars is coming undone. Distance and 38 years of cryogenic sleep have separated the lost crew of the UNSC starship Spirit of Fire from everything they knew at the start of the first game. We watch as Captain James Cutter—the player’s cipher and the commander of the near-derelict warship—is a stranger in an increasingly strange land. It only gets worse as a conflict with an exiled Brute super-warrior called Atriox starts taking away the few ties to human-controlled space he has left.

The second thread is Atriox himself. The cinema quality of the cutscenes from the first Halo Wars makes a return this time around, and those scenes are immediately put to use setting up the alien commander as the most distinct and impressive badass I’ve yet seen in a Halo game. Atriox is a raider with his own army and no friendly ties to Halo‘s perennial bad guys, the religious Covenant that have been trying to execute him for decades.

Here they come and there they go

The explosive first hour of Halo Wars 2 (and most of the game’s marketing) seems like it’s setting the stage for Cutter and Atriox to butt heads regarding tactics and ideologies. After the first mission, I was prepared for the pair to trade plenty of strategic space barbs, like the stars of some of the best science fiction stories.

The problem is that this would require Cutter and Atriox to actually be on screen for more than 10 total minutes in the game’s rather short campaign. Instead, there’s a lot of aloof badass-ery and deep lore fan-service—mostly from the Spirit of Fire‘s un-emotive trio of Spartan crewmembers. Cutter and the rest of the «main» Halo Wars cast, the actual human faces of the story, are relegated to mere talking heads telling the cyborgs what to blow up next between missions.

The central characters and their dilemmas have so much potential that just barely comes through in the cutscenes. They just don’t have much to do in Halo Wars 2‘s main campaign. Then, very suddenly, there’s nothing left to do at all. Topping off the underutilized themes and characters, Halo Wars 2 has the most abrupt and unsatisfying ending of any game in the series since the last Halo game with a «2» in the title.

Limitation breeds innovation

Between these slight delights and greater disappointments of the story, however, there’s one of the finest examples of real-time strategy gameplay on a console. Just as the first Halo brought better-than-passable shooting to consoles for the first time, Halo Wars 2 (and its predecessor) handles a real-time strategy game about as well as you can without a mouse and keyboard.

Leveling up across the campaign and multiplayer will earn you Blitz cards.
Base-building is mostly constricted to predetermined plots.
Cutter and the rest of the game’s human characters mostly exist as talking heads.
Even maxing out your unit cap, you won’t be able to field too many units at once.
If the maps are still too big for you, you can cycle between limited control groups and clusters of units.
Spartans gotta do what Spartans gotta do (steal tanks, I mean).
Besides Atriox, there are some Forerunner enemies. Although not many.
Ah, yes. The four genders.
Story is further explained in tons of collectible logs.
This guy. .. this frigging guy.

The key to the game working at all is a lot of necessary changes from PC real-time strategy games, which moot the console controller’s slower movement speeds. Anyone out there still mining the thin vein of high-profile RTS games will probably find Halo Wars 2‘s unit populations and map sizes awfully small, the camera more tightly pushed in, and your available commands slightly simplified. All of which feels just right for sitting six feet away from a TV.

Halo Wars 2 keeps almost all of the same smart shortcuts from the first Halo Wars game. Many units are built and bundled into squads for easier management, allowing for more bodies on the field at the same time. Bases are one-stop shops where you can harvest resources and train soldiers on predetermined plots. Those commandos will attack and move in autonomous coordination without any specific input from you, their commander. And yes, you can still call on «Local Units!» or «All Units!» with the press or double-tap of a button (and then spend the rest of your life hearing «All Units!» in your head anytime someone says either word, speaking from experience).

PCs and parallel processing

These streamlined commands miraculously morph into frustrating restrictions when you do play on a mouse and keyboard, however. Halo Wars 2 brings the sub-franchise to PC as well as Xbox One, and anyone who buys the game digitally will get both versions through Microsoft’s «Play Anywhere» program.

If you elect to play Halo Wars 2 on a computer, don’t expect a stiff challenge. On PC, you’re no longer limited to just four custom command groups (mapped to the D-pad on a controller), for instance. Yet the hard-wired logistics of Halo Wars 2—the unit populations, the farthest camera zoom—don’t account for the change in controls. The increased speed and precision of commands on a mouse and keyboard, combined with the game’s relatively simple structure, make the single-player campaign a relative cakewalk.

Playing the campaign in co-op mode has about the same effect on overall challenge. The two players involved don’t get any extra resources, but they can construct and command their own distinct sets of assigned squads. That’s very useful, because most missions in Halo Wars 2‘s campaign are built around completing the same objective multiple times or in multiple locations—capture these outputs, defend these structures, destroy those ones, etc.

The vital tension in Halo Wars 2 comes from juggling these tasks while countering imminent attacks on your own base, all without stretching your rigid pool of units too thin. In co-op mode, though, you and your partner effectively act as parallel processors, able to juggle multiple conflicting objectives at the same time. This ability to split your team focus is as much of a super-weapon as Atriox’s 10-story Scarabs in the late-game.

Walk the tightrope

Aside from co-op mode, there’s enough mission-based tension in Halo Wars 2 to keep your fingers and thumbs busy building structures, raising units, keeping your armies on the move, and considering counters to enemy attacks. The game gives you plenty of reason to stay constantly engaged without the tightrope slackening to the point of boredom.

Most of that engagement, though, comes not from the simple, staggered main objectives (which only ever place one or two scripted hurdles in your path), but from the copious optional and bonus objectives—“kill X units using Y ability” or “Upgrade every turret in this area,” for instance. These optional goals grant you account-wide XP that unlocks randomized card packs for use in Halo Wars 2‘s mostly multiplayer Blitz modes.

Whether you attempt these extra challenges for their own sake or for the extrinsic reward of the Blitz‘s blind boxes (or ignore them altogether) is entirely up to you. The numerous side objective are great for letting you tailor the game’s tension level to your own wants and needs for any given mission. It’s one thing to hold three control points, but it’s quite another to hold them while defending an AI ally’s base and hunting down enemy outposts and trying to do it all under a par time. Halo Wars 2 lets you decide which path you want to attempt.

And now, the end

The one exception to the fun of puzzling out these side objectives is the campaign’s anticlimax. Narratively, it’s a non-ending that lets the electrifying introduction of Atriox evaporate. Mechanically, it throws predetermined units at you in a final defensive stand. It’s as if the game doesn’t trust you (or its own slick stick-and-button controls) to carry too many of the lessons you learned over the main game into the final battle. Instead, it takes that responsibility from you, along with any pride you might have had in putting your skills as a commander to the test.

Halo Wars 2‘s main campaign doesn’t really build to anything, either in the story you watch unfold or the way you play the game. Of course, you can always take the lessons you learned into the multiplayer matches (which we haven’t been able to try as of press time. We’ll update this review when we do). Whatever problems the competitive multiplayer modes may have—player population, unit balance, Blitz pack randomness—an ineffective conclusion won’t be one of them.

The good

Halo Wars 2 is perfectly crafted for controllers from the bottom up
Side objectives let you keep the all-important level of tension as high or as low as you want
Fantastic cut scenes serve as rewards for completing missions and set up interesting ideas
It still shouts «All Units» and «Local Units» at you constantly

The bad

Playing with a mouse and keyboard feels artificially restricted
The short campaign ends on an insufferable cliffhanger
Interesting characters and themes are pushed aside for Spartan antics

The ugly

All the time you spend wishing Atriox got more screen-time

Verdict: Halo Wars 2‘s campaign is an exciting enough ride with a very plain final drop. Thankfully, there will be plenty of multiplayer modes to run with what the campaign teaches. Try it.

TV series release date, trailer, photo, video

18+

Release date	2023
Country	US
Genre	Action, Sci-Fi
Number of series	9
Studios/TV stations	Paramount Network
Director	Bathurst Otto
Scenario	Kane Stephen, Killen Kyle
Actors	Schreiber Pablo, He Yerin, Taylor Jen, McElhone Natasha
Kinopoisk Rating	7.04
IMDB rating	7. 10

In contact with

«Halo / Halo» season 2 — a continuation of a fantastic show based on the eponymous series of computer games from Microsoft Corporation.

The history of the Halo franchise began in 2001 with the release of the first game, a first-person shooter that offered to play as the super-soldier Master Chief. In 2013, Steven Spielberg himself took up the adaptation of the story. The release date of the project has been repeatedly shifted. The first season of the show premiered on March 23, 2022 on Paramount+. Halo received a 7.20 rating on IMDb and a 7.10 rating on Kinopoisk and was renewed for a second season.

The plot is not directly based on any part of the game. The action takes place in the 26th century. A bitter war is going on between the earthly forces of the United Nations Space Command and a religious alliance of several alien races. People are losing ground, and their last hope is the SPARTAN-II project — a program to create modified people, super-soldiers, who should become the most effective weapon in the fight against aliens.

“The Master Chief has been strengthened and trained with one goal in mind – to win this war. He and the other Spartans are our only effective weapon against the Covenant. It is deadly, modifiable, and, most importantly, controllable,” says Dr. Katherine Halsey, author of the new development. But the planet on which the research took place was found and destroyed by opponents. Only one Spartan, John-117, managed to escape. It is he who will change the course of the war.

The lead role went to Pablo Schreiber (The Wire, Orange Is the New Black, American Gods). The series also starred Yerin He, Natasha McElhone, Shabana Azmi, Bokeem Woodbine, Jen Taylor, Olive Gray, Charlie Murphy, Kate Kennedy, Bentley Kalu and others. The showrunners of the project are Killen Kyle and Stephen Caine.

The release date for the second season of Halo is unknown. Filming will start in summer 2022. The show is expected to release in 2023 on Paramount+.

The Halo franchise includes not only games, but also books, graphic novels, comics.

In the series in the history of the franchise, the face of Master Chief was shown.

The executive producer of the series is Steven Spielberg.

The project was originally supposed to be released on Showtime.

The series was filmed in Hungary.

The first season of «Halo» set a premiere record on Paramount+, breaking the previous record set by the historical drama «Yellowstone: 1883».

In contact with

series release date, trailer, photo, video

18+

In contact with

Halo/Halo Season 1 is an American science fiction television series on Showtime, based on the video game series of the same name by Microsoft Corporation. Later it became known that the premiere will take place in early 2022 on the Paramount + streaming service.

According to rumors, Steven Spielberg will head the project. True, it is not yet known how tightly the famous director and producer will deal with the show.

There is also no information on a specific plot for Halo Season 1. But there are ambitious statements from the creators that the output of their product should be neither more nor less than the Game of Thrones.

A popular series of games was tried to be filmed 15 years ago. Then it was a feature film. One of the Game of Thrones showrunners, D.B., even had a hand in the script. Weiss. But the creators did not reach the shooting: the project was too expensive. No wonder, because the entourage involves large-scale battles in outer space and fierce battles on different planets.

But now that shows have proven to be hugely profitable, Showtime has decided to bet on Halo.

It was originally planned that Natasha McElhone («Californication, You Can’t Forbid Beautiful Life») would give her voice to an artificial intelligence named Cortana, who told Master Chief how to act in a given situation.

However, in November 2020, Jen Taylor, who voiced Cortana in the original series of games, was invited to this role. At the same time, McElhone will play Dr. Katherine Halsey, in whose image and likeness the hologram of Cortana was created.

Note that the series, which is filmed in the Hungarian capital Budapest, will consist of nine episodes and will be released in the first quarter of 2022 on the Paramount+ service, formerly known as CBS All Access. The series was originally planned to air on Showtime.

Halo season 1 starts March 23, 2022.

What happens in Halo games

The plot of the game series revolves around the military confrontation between the United Nations Space Command (these are representatives of humanity) and the Covenant — an alliance of several alien races.

On 29 апреля, 2023 By alexxlab

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