Halo Wars for Xbox 360 Review

The designs of many video games feel like simple extensions of the games we used to play as children. I'm not talking about board or card games, though those are fairly well represented in the digital realm. I'm talking about things like shooters, which are just extensions of the fake war games we used to play. You know, "pew pew, I shot you, you're dead, no I shot you first!" All boys played "guns" at one point or another, which is undoubtedly where I learned my elite grenade spamming skills.

Real-time strategies also always reminded me of games we used to play as young boys. But usually when we played army men with our toys, it was with G.I. Joe, or Star Wars action figures or some unholy combination of the two. As long as the scale was correct, no one minded mixing the universes as we built huge battlefields on patches of dirt in our back yards, and had our toys fight to the death.

Since that's what RTS's have always felt like to me, Halo Wars feels like the ultimate backyard battle with my friends, provided we had action figure versions of every last vehicle and character in the Halo universe. Since that's somewhat impossible, we have a video game to realize our adolescent dreams. One heck of a video game, I might add.