Halo Marathon Begun

On 03/25/2017 at 11:23 PM by KnightDriver

And it started with Halo Wars 1. I played it all today in about 8 hours. I got very excited during the first few cut scenes because the game begins on planet Harvest where first contact with the Covenant was made. It felt like the true beginning of the Halo story; the true beginning of the human/covenant war. So here it is.

The space ship Spirt of Fire is sent to Harvest to help rid the planet of Covenant forces. There they find Covenant unearthing a Forerunner artifact. You fight for its control and then follow the Covenant to the planet Arcadia, where you rescue humans and destroy a giant Scarab under construction. Then you follow the Covenant to Flood controlled space and fight over Forerunner battle ships. You blow them all up and are sent adrift in space. End of story.

You play 15 missions in the best console RTS experience yet. The controls work really well. You can build bases and dispatch troopes, vehicles and flying craft really easily. My favorite part was selecting Spartans on the field and using them to capture Covenant vehicles. The Scarabs are devastating weapons as are the Locust, which are just a lot smaller. It was super fun to blow stuff up with them.

I was tempted to hunt for achievements but I had done most of the single player and co-op ones when I played it first in 2009. I really wanted some kind of open ended mode where you could just amass huge armies and roll them over a landscape. Most of the map areas are fairly small and require the execution of certain objectives. I tried skirmish mode against an A.I. player but it wasn't that interesting.

I remember it was really fun to replay a similar game, Warcarft II, but there was a little more resource management, city building and the maps were larger. The missions were more open ended too. You could approach them in different ways. In Halo Wars, it's pretty much cut and dry: build a bunch of units and roll over the opposition. Still, it was really fun.

On to Halo Reach where it looks really bad for the humans.

Matt Snee Staff Writer

03/25/2017 at 11:32 PM

good luck dude. Watch out for those shield dudes and smack a grunt for me.

KnightDriver

03/25/2017 at 11:41 PM

I wish I could keep a grunt kill count. At the end it's going to be like a million.

03/26/2017 at 12:37 AM

I love throwing sticky grenades on them.

03/28/2017 at 12:35 AM

I did that today alot with unlimited ammo turned on. I like watching them try and shake it off.

Cary Woodham

03/26/2017 at 09:54 AM

Ride those tractors!

Super Step Contributing Writer

03/26/2017 at 11:08 AM

I love this comment. Mainly because I'm not sure what the context is.

I think I might prefer halo wars to other rts. Might be good to start with something more straightforward.

03/26/2017 at 08:08 PM

Well when I would watch my brothers play Halo games, I would always call the vehicles they drove around in 'tractors' for some reason. Mainly I did it to annoy them. I told KnightDriver this earlier so hopefully he'll remember and get the reference in context. :)

03/28/2017 at 12:29 AM

Well, those Warthogs sure don't hug the road like tractors. They bounce and slide around like moon buggies.

Halochief90

03/27/2017 at 10:37 AM

I can't imagine doing a Halo marathon with how much I've played them. So many games too, I think they've done about ten now. Anyway, wish you the best and I hope you have fun.

03/28/2017 at 12:27 AM

Yea, it's a lot but I'm mainly going to run the campaigns. So that doesn't take too long.

goaztecs

03/29/2017 at 11:50 AM

I forgot to ask, when playing through the Halo games in order are you taking a break to read the novels that fit in with the timeline to get a full story?

Have fun playing through the Halo Universe!

03/30/2017 at 12:10 AM

So, I saw the list that contains all Halo media in chronological order. Oh god, no. I have read all the books but a book takes something like a game's worth of time to read. It would easily double the time of this project. Although, now I think about it and look at the list again, it might be cool to do that sometime. A lot of the books do fill in some important details of the overall story like where did 343 Guilty Spark come from and how did Master Chief become a Spartan. I do recall now seeing Huragoks (engineers) in Halo 2 and screaming at my a.i. team mates to stop shooting them because they were innocent slaves of The Covenant. You wouldn't know that, though, if you hadn't read the books.

PixlBit