Real time strategy games have, to this point, not fared very well in the console environment. Designed for keyboard and mouse, the tendency has been to adapt mouse and hotkey driven gameplay to a button and trigger control. It’s an ill fit, to be sure. But Ensemble is confident that they have solved the issues by developing Halo Wars exclusively for the Xbox 360.

Set in the time period before the first Halo shooter, you will control armies of Spartans and marines in battle against Covenant forces. Each unit has a single special ability and a series of upgrades – the typical RTS stuff. But they have kept the unit cap small (30 units, upgradeable to 40) in order to keep battles small and manageable.

You can see the Ensemble touch in a lot of the game play choices. As in Age of Mythology, map control is achieved by seizing new base sites. You can send mobile barracks into the fray, but these bases, scattered across the map, will be the centers of your resource and research tasks. Like Age of Empires III, the map is littered with resource bonuses that be harvested by scout units, giving you an early incentive to explore the map.

Because the unit population is so small, there is no need to use a drag/select mechanism, though you can “paint” a small area to choose specific units. Instead, you will usually use on-screen or global selection when you pick an army. Every button and trigger has a specific use, so there is no confusion about context when you are in the heat of battle.

Halo Wars looks great. The colors are bright and the sight of a Spartan ripping the driver out of a Wraith and seizing the vehicle is visual pleasure. The four player maps are smaller than most serious RTS players are accustomed to, primarily because the designers want to get players shooting at each other as soon as possible. Though they claim that an early Marine rush isn’t viable, it’s hard to get that impression against the demo AI, which didn’t put up much of a fight (maybe to make the journalists feel good about themselves?)