Saturday, November 14, 2009

Halo Wars Campaign Completed for the 2nd and 3rd Time


I hadn't really touched Halo Wars for months, so I decided to replay its Campaign, but this time on Heroic. Aside from Chapter 6, which proved ridiculously hard, the Campaign wasn't too bad at all, and I won each Mission under par time save for Chapter 6, which I'll re-attempt with some positive Skulls on later.

Mainly, I found the best thing to do was to quickly build up your economy and bass defences, and then upgrade and train Scorpions and Marines, replacing the Marines with Wolverines once they became available. I then focused specifically on the main objective to complete par times, and this worked on almost every level save the odd one where it was better to go all Hornets or whatever. Not too shabby, and I had a really great time with the Campaign. The cinematics are still top-notch, and I'm quite impressed at how well Ensemble Studios managed to translate RTS to a console controller.

I did notice some unit path finding issues more so this playthrough, where some units I'd issue a specific command to might get stuck amongst it's allies or whatever, and this caused me some grief from time to time. Not sure if this AI quirk was introduced via a Title Update by accident, or if it was always there and I simply didn't notice on Normal. I also had another weird bug at the beginning of Chapter 13 where my Xbox 360 would freeze on me if I had a Spartan board that first Locust, but once I stopped trying to do that I was fine, and on a subsequent replay this bug did not repeat itself. Weird.

After winning on Heroic, I checked my Service Record and noted that back in the Spring when I was Achievement whoring, I played all but 4 Missions through on Easy, so I decided to complete them so I could say I've gone through the Campaign three times now. And I did.

Next up for me on Halo Wars is to get Chapter 6 won on Heroic under par time, and to see if I can find a Co-Op partner for Legendary Difficulty. I also want to play a lot of Multiplayer soon and try to get the Office on Deck Achievement.

Honestly, this is one game I'd love to see a sequel to, however I have a sad feeling that I won't.

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