Halo Wars is a good game, but hardcore RTS fans may be put off by its simple game design.
The story so far definitely hasn't been all that great so far. It's told through some great-looking cinematic cutscenes, but the actual story here is quite weak. You start off on some planet called Harvest. You play as Sgt. John Forge on the UNSC forces investing Covenant activity. There are some other characters-some captain who's name I forget; Doctor Anders, who's just some scientist who surprisingly has a personality, or should I say lack-thereof; and finally there's Serina, a holographic projection who gives you not-so-helpful tips throughout the course of the game. Anyway, some lead Arbiter gets his hands on a super powered weapon, and so your mission is to stop him. Generally I tended to skip some of the cutscenes just to move onto the actual gameplay.
After going through a couple of brief tutorials, you're pretty much set for playing Halo Wars. This is due primarily to the simple level design and controls of Halo Wars. In turn, there's only a limited amount of options in terms of your units. For one thing, you can't assign custom groups, meaning you can't command specific people to move to one place while another group of people move somewhere else. This makes it extremely frustrating when you're trying to defend three different targets for fifteen minutes. You'll be building bases to spawn more troops in. You can upgrade your soldiers or get upgraded soldiers, but you can only spawn a limited amount of them at one given time. It also would've been nice to be able to access the build menu at any given time, but that's a small gripe.
Once you actually start fighting your enemies, Halo Wars starts to become pretty fun…for a while, that is. X and Y are your attack buttons. All you really have to do is select all units to fight a horde of enemies, given that there aren't tons of locations full of enemies. When you happen to run across a group of enemies, your soldiers will automatically attack them, making fighting them pretty easy. In fact, this game is just easy when it comes down to it. Enemies aren't particularly smart on the normal or easy difficulty setting, and your units surprisingly don't go down too quickly. However, you only have a limited amount of units and terrain, for that matter. These factors considerably limit the scale of each battle, at least in single player. Oh, yeah, there is co-op for single player, which is still basically the same as playing by yourself except the game is even easier. There are also skulls to collect, just like Halo 3, but it's really not worth the time, and the Covenant isn't actually playable in the campaign. Some people complain about not being able to play as the Flood, but I never really liked the Flood, so it doesn't really bother me.
Multiplayer is unfortunately surprisingly limited in terms of game modes. There's basically only skirmish and Deathmatch, and the player limit is restricted to six players in one match at most. This means you'll be playing three-on-three a lot of the time. And, like I said before, this also limits the scales of battles from their fullest potential, but again it is less limited here than in the campaign. I also would've liked to have a free-for-all type mode. Every leader for each faction has some sort of special ability in multiplayer. These include anything from laser attacks to vortex shields. Multiplayer does give the game some more longevity, considering that the campaign probably takes around four or five hours to beat in total.
The visuals in Halo Wars are decent-I'll give it that. The explosions and such do look good, just not great. The enemies and your units look good from far away, but the game limits you from moving in too close to the action, so you can't see them from close range. The environments generally look bland, and for some reason, a dark shadow is cast over any area outside of, say, fifty feet from your current position, which doesn't really help. The cinematic cutscenes look great, but the story wasn't that good, making it hard to appreciate them when I didn't care much for what was going on in them. What can I say about the soundtrack? It's Halo, so you'll know it'll be good. It has some of the same music played in Halo 3, which definitely made it better for me.
Overall, Halo Wars is actually a good, solid game. There's just nothing that really draws your attention about it. The gameplay can become boring after a while, but at least the controls are smooth and easy to use. The campaign doesn't last long, but the multiplayer will extend your playing time for a few more hours. Hardcore RTS fans may be put off with Halo Wars' simple design, but fans of the series may still appreciate Halo Wars and should consider buying it.