Halo Wars: Definitive Edition

Although the game is old, it still holds up fairly well. It runs smoothly even on low-end (potato) PCs. However, some units are overpowered and break the game balance. Overall: 6/10.

Getting this on sale was well worth it. It’s a pretty small game with only 15 missions but if you’re a fan of old RTS Classics such as the Command and Conquer franchise then definitely pick this up because it feels very much in this spirit of those games but with the Halo spin on it.

This was such a nostalgic game to play on the 360 back in the day, honestly. I love the RTS aspect and the lore material for the whole Halo storyline.

Top tier Halo Game, soundtrack is amazing, game play holds up still, and the animation for 2008 (approx) is outstanding. Very happy they ported this to steam, and plays amazing on the steam deck.

It's Fun. Get on sale as its only ~9 hours of single-player content if you suck. Haven't tried multiplayer but knowing the age of this game the matchmaking is probably dead. Lastly: couldn't play as the flood or covenant.

Halo Wars is a gem of a game that gave us a fun little story, some interesting RTS gameplay, and some wonderful lore. The Multiplayer still has activity but do bear in mind that the game is 15 years old and a great many of the players have already figured out what builds are strong. It's a great time, even if the time you spend with it is short.

Played it back on Xbox360 for the first time and had positive memory from it, glad that it exists also for PC. Simple but great strategy game in the Halo universe. The story is awesome, especially the cutscenes! That's how we like Halo games!

I used to love playing this game on Xbox. Unfortunately, the PC port's controls are horrific and unintuitive, and completely ruin the game for me. Most of the annoying ones straight-up can't be changed, and it also doesn't help that keys that should really be combined or shared are forcibly separated, IE pressing escape to pause and to exit a popup menu.

While Halo Wars 2 is out, currently it's not on Steam. So this game is way more cool. Plus, it's got a cool campaign and a dope setting. The multiplayer is pretty fun too.

I wish they would make some new maps. Add control group functionality to buildings. And I wish they would allow the Arbiter to attack garrisoned units, even if it's only at 10% effectiveness.

This Game is very good and entertaining. GOOD TIME

i cannot objectively judge this game because i am fanboy and am blind to any problems.
i 100%-ed this on the old xbox360 with a lot of boosting.

dude if you are here you looking at RTS games ur gonna buy it

a pretty good strategy game, feels like Dawn of War but less clunky. pretty fun game to pick up!

now can y'all get Halo Wars 2 on steam lol

Dropping out the review, initial recommend set, right here!

What could have been a mediocre game is instead transformed into a bad game, ruined by clunky movement and poor unit pathing that turns the most basic mechanics of gameplay into a chore. This is not simply a sign of the times, as this game came out in 2009, and there are plenty of RTS games that came out 10+ years prior that do not suffer from the same problems.

Aside from the above, the overall gameplay is fairly shallow. I wouldn't recommend this game unless you're a die hard fan of the Halo universe. If you're not a huge Halo fan and are simply looking for a new RTS to try out, I would look elsewhere.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☑ Very good
☐ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Grandma

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☑ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 15% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☑ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☑ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

---{ Author }---
☑ https://vojtastruhar.github.io/steam-review-template

Shame there isn't cross platform with Xbox, this game is horribly underrated. Shoutout to Turnip, Shrek and MrPig

I originally got this game on the xbox 360 and I still replay it once in a while to this day. Better than the sequel in my opinion.

not much to say, glad i picked this game up for cheap while i could.

cant believe how toxic pc players are. you can tell the lgbtq community is strong in this game

If you love RTS and Halo, you are in luck.

i cant believe hot toxic pc players are. You can tel the lgbtq community is strong in this game

Halo Wars: Definitive Edition… well, let's just say Halo should have stuck to its roots. This game, being an RTS (Real-Time Strategy), feels a bit out of place in the Halo universe. It’s definitely not what fans of the franchise are used to. The tactical gameplay and top-down perspective just don't capture the same feeling as the first-person shooter series. While the game itself is solid for an RTS, it’s just not what I expected from a Halo title. If you're a fan of strategy games, you might enjoy it, but if you love the classic Halo shooter experience, this one might not be for you.

All units.

Local units.

good for playing solo and modding

Halo Wars is one of my favorite games ever, I got it when it was Available and played it on the original Xbox 360; the game is a must have for any RTS fan and if you are a Halo fan I would recommend it for stunning cutscenes and the story alone! If Halo Wars 2 was available on Steam I would recommend it to. A good story, brilliant cutscenes, and addictive gameplay make this game amazing fun for a solo play to having fun with friends.

Mods bring this game to another level, and I would recommend it to anyone who would be somewhat interested in it!

Command & Conquer but more "find me a weaponier."

Issa good, fun, short campaign and i wish there was more support/updates for it but you cant win em all

its simple, and yet a lot more fun than expected

I got this on sale for five bucks and I think I got five bucks worth of entertainment out of it. I got excited when I saw it on sale because I remember playing this as a kid. That being said, nostalgia definitely leaned into me buying it. If you want to get mo

very accurate to my memory of halo wars

ALL UNITS

LOCAL UNITS

ALL UNITS

LOCAL UNITS

ALL UNITS

LOCAL UNITS

ALL UNITS

LOCAL UNITS

One of the games that im happy i wasnt remembering through rose tinted glasses.
Halo Wars is one of, if not THE, best spinoffs for a series ever. From an FPS to an RTS they made it feel like Halo was always an RTS. The gameplay is good, and considering it was made for the xbox 360 it has a surprising amount of depth to it with build orders, unit attacks and even the dialogue. If you have a spartan alongside marines the marines will actually comment on it, same with other units. Its truly a great game and one of the first halo games i played on my own back when i was younger.
A great game, hopefully we see a HW2 port soon.

This is such a classic with unlimited replayable value if you grew up with Halo. Highly recommend.

You cannot remap the keyboard commands.
The developer probably couldn’t set their pride aside and admit that any RTS player could come up with a more functional keybinding than the one imposed by the game. Or, to be more precise, "the one the game tries to impose," since you can remap the keyboard directly in Windows. Of course, it's very inconvenient, and the really annoying thing is that this could have easily been avoided.

stop the stupid genocidal aliens from fucking up a shield world and unleashing the parasite aliens twenty years earlier than in canon

Despite people umming and awwing about this when it released it's aged incredibly well. Fun RTS set in the halo universe which is incredibly engaging. The sequel suffered from 343 syndrome in that they made nearly everything worse, but thankfully this gem is still around. Pretty much all Halo games pre 343 were great and this is no exception.

Amazing RTS Game here, love that's inspired by the halo univers, would be fire to have another one make or a remake of this one maybe would more missions or better campaigns

While better than the sequel, this game still pales in comparison to other RTS games by Microsoft such as Age of Empires 2 and Age of Mythology. This game sure ain't no Men of War or Company of Heroes. Very shallow and dull compared to other RTS games, this game was made as a console exclusive for the Xbox 360 originally. This is the black sheep of the franchise due to its departure from a series associated with first person shooters. I don't think even Halo fans could enjoy this, its just mediocre all around.

Good cinematics but short campaign and story. The mechanics are mediocre for PC strategic gaming

Halo Wars marks multiple milestones. It’s the first Halo spin-off game, the first non-FPS Halo game, and the last game Ensemble Studios ever made. It’s also one of the only RTS games that was designed for consoles that I can think of. Most other console RTS games I know are ports of their PC versions, and most of those are terrible. Halo Wars is… less terrible. It certainly feels like a Halo game in the visual and audio departments, but this is a pretty bad RTS game. It lacks a lot of fundamental controls, base building is entirely unsatisfying, and the units feel awful to command.

I wouldn’t consider myself an expert at RTS games, but I’ve played enough of Starcraft, Command & Conquer, and Warcraft to know what good economic systems, responsive units, and tech trees look like. Halo Wars is lacking in pretty much all aspects of a quality RTS and it’s shocking that Ensemble Studios, makers of Age of Empires, fumbled this hard at their own bread and butter. Base building is awful, with only 7 spots on a single base to build structures and severely limited options on where you can even put them. Resource collection, tech upgrade buildings, and unit training structures have to compete for these spots, oftentimes forcing you to choose between having a good economy or the ability to train units. Since unit upgrades are built from the same building they train from, you can’t build units and upgrades simultaneously, so the pace of the game is abysmally slow. Unit pathfinding is atrocious. They are completely incapable of moving around each other and often get stuck, and vehicles will stop all momentum when given a new move command. Units can move and attack at the same time, but with no way of commanding them to hold position, they will run off and attack enemy units on their own if they get too close, making defensive positions or sieges near impossible to set up. And the cost of tech upgrades is absurd. A certain number of reactors are needed to make upgrades, and the cost of upgrading a reactor is nearly 3 times as much as building a new one on top of the insanely high price of the upgrades themselves. As an example, the cost of raising the supply cap from 30-40 is a total of 3000 resources, the price of 6 Scorpion tanks. Not all of this can be blamed on the limitations of the console.

To the game’s credit, playing the game with a controller actually feels fairly intuitive, even though hotkeys, control groups, and camera positions don’t exist. In fact, it feels a lot better playing this game on controller than it does on mouse and keyboard. The PC port does give the ability to make control groups on m&kb, but it’s not really necessary and the camera movement feels especially awful. If you do play this game, use a controller. It’s less of a headache.

Since this game is pretty damn unsatisfying as an RTS, the only reason to play it would be to experience the campaign. It’s a fairly short one at about 10 hours, and most of the missions aren’t all that difficult. Plus it offers co-op for the campaign, and it works pretty well. The jump from Heroic to Legendary is pretty insane though. The increase in damage dealt by the enemy is so great, that it becomes a very micro intensive game, and having to micro with this pathfinding is frustrating enough on Heroic. The story… exists. Halo games never had great stories, but the Bungie games were told well and had likeable and memorable characters as well as great visuals and an excellent soundtrack to carry it. Cutter, Forge, and Anders are no Keyes, Johnson, and Cortana in terms of being memorable, and the plot is a pretty meaningless side story that doesn’t really add much to Halo’s universe, but it has its fair share of cool moments. And damn does the game look and sound pretty, especially with those Blur cutscenes.

My recommendation for this game is a very weak one and comes from a completely biased perspective. This game is not a good strategy game. But I’m a big fan of the Halo series, well the Bungie era games anyway, and this game is very reminiscent of that era. If you’re a casual fan of Halo, or you are a fan of RTS games, then you’re probably not going to like this game at all for the reasons I mentioned above and then some. But if you’re sick of playing the main series’ campaigns to death, this would be a nice change of pace while still feeling familiar.

Halo Wars 2 Definitive Edition with all DLC on Steam please!

A lot of fun to play modded. Base game gets boring after a bit.

"Forge is down".

Xbox 360 classic. Runs well on PC, even a potato. Great turn-your-brain-off simplicity but enough complexity for strategy and scratching the RTS itch. Good Campaign story. Recommend using a controller. Wait for sale.

Multiplayer with friends on legendary will have you questioning your life choices at first but you'll have fun figuring it out.

Ensemble really captured the look and feel of Halo well and translated it to a new genre back in the day. They will be missed.

Love this game. Its simple, but it adds so much to the Halo Universe, that if you like Halo you do yourself a disservice by not giving it a try

It has been ages since I found a game to hold my interest and this was very entertaining. I only completed it on normal, but will be going back in for more. Nice game to pass the time and easy to pick up.

I may only have 3 hours but goddam this game is wonderful 10/10 great models of stuff and the bases look so good

Fun RTS game with decent story line. Wait to have it go on sale.

amazing game worth the purchase 100%

It's a bit clunky, It's a bit old but still has that good old halo feel to it.
The visuals, the unit's, the music all got that old halo goodness
Shame we're probably never gonna get a third