Halo Wars: The Battle of Console RTS

RATING: 7 / 10
PLATFORM: Xbox360
GENRE: RTS
PURCHASE RECOMMENDATION: Rent

So lets face reality here this game was really an experiment to see if a RTS game would be successful on the console. I have to tip my hat to Ensemble cause they did really almost all they could in designing a control scheme that would work. The game plays well and you can somewhat easily control your units on the map. You can basically select units in three ways, select all units, select all units on the screen (local units), and select highlighted units. The highlighted units is really the only inventive selecting as it decently recreates the drag and select of a mouse. Unfortunately there is no efficient way to select a unit by type which can be very frustrating. Not being able to select a unit by type units greatly hinders special abilities. It is obvious that abilities like grenades, ram and hijack not working well together. The biggest issue I has with the game was the ability to not queue units when I had no cash. If I want to build ten tanks I could not just queue ten tanks and as the money come in they would be built. Instead I would often have to bounce back and fourth between my troops and bases every time I got just a little extra cash so that I could constantly be producing more units. RTS games are about be efficient in your strategy and this mechanic breaks that.

I had hope that Halo Wars would save itself by having a really strong story tide in to the missions. The story is good but not great in Halo Wars, it is epic but yet confusing in all the wrong ways. I expected a lot more coolness from the story I mean after all this is the time when Spartans were abundant and kicking.....well you get the idea. All together the units didn't have that coolness factor and the level were mostly quickly go save these people with a time limit before you all die. Oh well it was a good shot and because of that I recommend people at least rent this game to give it a go.

ExciteBots: Not that exciting

RATING: 4 / 10
PLATFORM: Wii
GENRE: Racing
PURCHASE RECOMMENDATION: Don't Bother Playing

I was very excited to play ExciteBots after demoing it at GDC this year. The Wii has been hurting some time now and ExciteBots look like what was going to be a fun multiplayer experience. Well the people who made ExciteBots (to disgusted to even look them up) took what could of been a great game and destroyed it threw stupid design decisions. When you load ExciteBots without any save data the player is FORCED to play a beginner cup before doing anything else. You can't even play mutiplayer until you have done this, which means if I want to bring this game over to a friends house I either need to transfer my save game or beat the beginner cup again before we can both play. I would love to know what genius came up with this idea a multiplayer game that set up boundaries to prevent a multiplayer experience. All this is forcing player error is scatter threw out the game. Almost everything is locked including half the racer, 2/3 of the levels and 3/4 of the game type choices. If I am good at racing game of this type I must beat the entire game on easy before I can move on to a harder challenge. Instead of carefully designing a fun reward system the developers simple locked almost everything.

Anyways I going to move on from my rant and fast forward about 30 mins of beginning game stupidity to talk about the actual game play itself. So excitebots is your typical style mario kart meets X games. Excitebots you spend most of the time in air from jumps or boosting like crazy. Excitebots is all about being on the edge of control and verge of insanity. The environments look really nice and are decently themed. The power ups are way out there, completely random and feel really out of place. I admire the inventiveness but since the game is all about being as ADHD (yes I do mean the disorder) as possible it is really like chucking a barrel of paint on to a white canvas, a utter mess. The biggest flaw in the game is that there is really little interaction between players. Games like Mario Kart survive on the satisfaction of hitting another player with a turtle shell. Excitebots strength should be its multiplayer and instead that is its weakest point. The only reason I gave this game even a 4 is because there is so much potential for this game too bad it is just covered up in crap.