The first element that leaps out at you when beginning the single player campaign is the stunning quality of the cut scenes. Historically, Halo has rendered all its cut scenes using the in-game engine (sometimes with a bit of extra polish) and while they've always been engaging and well directed, they're not as impressive as full CGI. Given the less detailed units of a real-time strategy game, in Halo Wars, for the first time ever, we're treated to gorgeous, beautifully rendered full motion video, with seamless character animation and incredible detail on every aspect of the visuals. There's plenty of familiarity with the Halo universe too - the Pillar of Autumn and Admiral Cole (as in the Cole Protocol) are both mentioned in some of the early cut scenes, so it's great to see not only a beautifully presented and intriguing story to accompany the action, but one that draws upon the rich background of the previous games and the various novels as well.

Set twenty years before the original Halo, the story begins with UNSC forces confronting the Covenant on the planet Harvest, where they have uncovered a mysterious ancient technological relic - yes, you guessed it, it's a Forerunner installation and when 'the Infection' is mentioned, it's a pretty good bet that the Flood and possibly even sentinels and monitors will be making an appearance in Halo Wars (more details on this can be found in our interview later in this article). The first three missions take place in the snowy tundra of one of Harvest's continents and they're so straightforward that you barely even need to complete the two sections of the helpful and friendly tutorial - as long as you've played at least one RTS before, everything in Halo Wars comes very naturally. Don't think that the game will be a pushover though; the difficulty steps up a notch in missions four and five, providing a definite challenge - and that's just on the Normal setting, so expect to have a real fight on your hands during the Heroic and Legendary modes.

Once into the game itself, the visuals are again the first thing that really capture your attention; Ensemble Studios has been painstaking in its attention to detail when it comes to constructing a faithful recreation of the Halo universe; everything from the look of the troops, vehicles and weapons to the design of buildings, Covenant technology and Forerunner relics is totally convincing. Warthogs bounce over the terrain as their gunners blast at groups of plasma pistol-toting enemy Grunts, each with an Elite or Brute Commander who's armed with a plasma rifle, spikers or a needler, Jackals snipe at you from strategic vantage points, groups of marines charge in with assault and battle rifles rattling as frag and plasma grenades fly back and forth between the warring factions. Pairs of Hunters charge in, blasting at you with their arm-mounted fuel rod cannons or lunging in close for a swipe. As well as the likes of Hornets, Wraiths, Ghosts and Banshees, there are a number of new vehicles on both sides of the conflict, each befitting the side's technology and fitting perfectly into this new version of the Halo universe, and every troop, weapon and vehicle features familiar sound effects that complete the atmosphere of battle and make you really feel like you're in the thick of the action, even though you're viewing it from high above, using the right thumbstick to zoom in and out and rotate the generally stable and helpful camera.

After the opening missions it's off to another planet and while I can't say too much about what comes next at this point, suffice it to say that the new setting is not only a refreshing change but it also throws up new challenges, requiring fast thinking and a quick response to enemy insertions as Covenant dropships soar over the terrain to drop off turrets and troops. The campaign features fifteen increasingly challenging missions and although it probably won't take more than a dozen or so hours to complete it, there are a number of optional objectives in each one, along with hidden skulls, plus you are given an overall score and rating that takes into account the completion of objectives, finding of skulls, time taken and damage done, meaning that getting a gold awarded on each level will require many play-throughs and pinpoint precision, giving the campaign plenty of longevity.

It's not until you play a multiplayer game that the true scope and depth of the game really hits you, though. Again, I can't talk specifics too much (check out our upcoming review for the full details!) but there are several playable factions, including leader characters with their own unique (and devastating or life-saving) abilities, along with the option to build a number of bases at various locations on each of the skirmish maps on offer, of which there are over a dozen. When it comes to bases, you have the option to expand to add extra nodes, then you need to decide how to prioritise which buildings you construct; are you going to focus on creating structures that generate resources (the only source of resources in this game are the crates scattered around each level and buildings that automatically generate the resources that you need to build structures and train troops) or do you want to have access to infantry, air units and land vehicle units? Do you want to increase your technology level to unlock better units and upgrades, or are you happy to swarm over your foe with large numbers of lower level troops? Are you going to take a chance and save up enough resources for an uber-unit, or is your base turret defence going to be your top priority?

Even with so much choice - as there should be in any RTS - the one thing I will say is that having never played Halo Wars before, my first ever experience of the game was a multiplayer battle of two versus two, and I just sat down and played. No manual, no help, no tutorial - I just sat down and within a matter of minutes I had an expanded base, I was researching upgrades, I had base defences and various troops and vehicles were pouring out of the training camp and rolling off the construction line. This isn't because I'm an RTS genius though; instead, it's testament to the skill with which Ensemble has implemented its control scheme, including shortcuts that allow you to leap to your base, between units and to hotspots where your troops are being attacked with the press of the d-pad. You can select all local units or every unit you have using the right and left bumpers respectively, while you use the A button to select individual units (or hold to select a number), with X and Y used to command units to attack, so there's no chance of accidentally selecting something by mistake when you meant to order your units to move or attack. You can also emplace infantry in cover positions, such as vehicle wreckage or turrets, making them a lot less vulnerable to enemy fire, a very handy strategy that is essential if you want to score high on the fourth mission.

As much as I would love to tell you more about the game, you'll have to wait for the review for more details - for now, all you need to know is that Halo Wars succeeds in faithfully recreating the Halo universe that we all know and love down to the smallest detail, yet it feels completely different in terms of its gameplay. It's a real-time strategy game that's exciting, engaging, fast-moving and challenging in its own right, with a wealth of tactics and options to choose from, while in terms of control systems, this is the closest anyone has come to providing a worthy alternative to the mouse and keyboard combo so far, meaning that novice RTS gamers are free to battle the enemy rather than fighting with the controls.

After a short and sharp presentation from Jason Pace, Halo Wars' Lead Producer, we were let loose upon the game and the hours just flew by - other than a quick break to enjoy the delicious buffet put out by our hosts, and to get a photo of me and the Chief (or MC as he's known to his friends!), I barely took a break or even looked up to take in my surroundings; I was utterly engrossed in the game and had to be virtually torn away from it at the end of the day when the Microsoft team had to start packing up the Xbox 360s and HDTVs! I did however manage to take a few minutes out to speak with Jason and ply him with questions, so read on for more juicy details about the forthcoming game.

GH: Are you a fan of the Halo trilogy and if so which is your favourite game of the three and why?

JP: I'm a massive fan of the Halo trilogy. I actually beat on the Halo studio's door for months, trying to get them to hire me, and when they finally did it was a very happy day indeed. It's hard to say which is my favourite - I think Halo 1 is my favourite simply because your first time's always the best, right? No other first person shooter had really been done as well as Halo had been done on console and so it has to be my favourite.

GH: What were your main aims when starting the project?

JP: There were two fundamental things that we needed to accomplish and I think we have. The first one was: we needed this to be an incredible Halo experience - we needed Halo fans to sit down, play through the game and say "Holy crap, that was an awesome Halo game." And the second, we needed to make it a great strategy game on the console. If we had succeeded in creating a great Halo experience that didn't play well because it had control limitations or any of the historical limitations that have hampered PC games that have migrated to console then we would have failed, so we had to do for strategy games what Bungie did for FPS games - we had to prove that model on console.

GH: How closely have you worked with Bungie in retaining the atmosphere and history of the Halo series, and have you drawn inspiration from the Halo novels as well as the background of the games?

JP: Oh absolutely, Bungie was involved from the very beginning and every step of the way; everything from story consultation to the design of the Warthogs and how they drove and how they played, those guys know every aspect of every unit in the game forwards and backwards - they were intimately involved throughout the development cycle.

GH: Was that input helpful?

JP: Very much so. I think that we would have, no pun intended, spun our wheels a lot on the design of the units had we not had the luxury of talking to Bungie and sharing assets with them.

GH: Will we be seeing any familiar faces in Halo Wars, such as Avery Johnson, Jacob Keyes, Dr. Halsey, Cortana and of course Master Chief himself?

JP: That I will let players experience for themselves! [I'm taking that as confirmation that at least one of the above characters will make an appearance! Geoff.]

GH: The Brutes didn't make an appearance until Halo 2 - will they be featured in Halo Wars?

JP: From the get go, when you sit down and play multiplayer, the Brute Chieftain is an option as a playable character.

GH: Will the Flood feature in Halo Wars and will any installation monitors or sentinels be making an appearance?

JP: I will say "yes" to both of those!

GH: And is there a plausible explanation given as to why the UNSC is coming across these guys when it appeared that the original Halo was the first time they encountered the Flood?

JP: You'll discover that as you play through the game!

GH: Many people still feel that no console RTS has yet hit upon a control system that's as smooth as mouse and keyboard on the PC. What have you done to try and resolve this issue and do you feel you've succeeded in creating an ideal alternative for Halo Wars?

JP: This is one of my favourite topics because everybody is so proud of what we've done with the controls - what Ensemble has done. I think that the conversation starts when you say "how do you make a PC strategy game work on the console?" and that's where everybody starts that discussion who has tried to do it historically, and so you try to overlay a control model onto a game mechanic that was designed for a different platform. For us, we gave ourselves the freedom - and Ensemble gave themselves the freedom as well - to innovate within that game mechanic. We weren't just creating a new control scheme, we were building and evolving the genre itself and so I think that's why we were successful. Ensemble, more than probably anybody else on the planet, knows the fundamentals of a great strategy game, so they're exactly the right people to say, "okay, if we're starting over from the beginning on a new platform, what can we chop, what can we keep, what do we need to change and evolve?" - and that's what they did.

GH: So Ensemble have tried to rebuild the genre with the console in mind, forgetting largely about what's happened on the PC in the past?

JP: I wouldn't say that, I would say changing the things on the PC that aren't absolutely required to have a great strategy experience. Some things you don't ever want to change - you need the freedom to be able to build different kinds of units based on your preferred game strategy for example, you can't change that, but maybe it's not so important for you to have tons of remote locations where you're farming and mining resources that you need to defend - and that is very much a PC convention that's very important for that particular mechanic, but there are things you can do to the mechanic that give you that same experience that take away the need to micro-manage and move all around the map.

GH: Sticking with that subject, resource gathering is often seen as the biggest chore in RTS games. Is there resource gathering in Halo Wars and if so how big a role does it play?

JP: There is resource gathering in Halo Wars - everything is dependent on resources but we've streamlined the way in which you produce resources so that it does not become tedious. For example, my preferred play style, I always like to have tons of resources - some people like to ride that edge but I like to just have thousands, so what I do is as soon as possible get a secondary base location that I will devote entirely to producing resources. So, instead of gathering resources in Halo Wars, we have the means to use a slot on the base to produce them, and where some additional strategy comes in is that we have a finite number of slots on those bases, so you are always choosing between, do I want to make new units, do I want to make resources, do I want to upgrade my units, and the complexity increases when we allow you to get separate, remote, base locations. They need to be defended, so if I have a base that's purely producing resources, I need to consider what happens when it gets attacked - what does that do to me? But it's very much a streamlined process in Halo Wars because you create resource-producing factories and then you don't need to think about them any more, you just need to make sure they're defended, and that one resource type is used throughout the entire game for all units.

GH: How much diversity is there with regards to map terrain, weapons, and vehicles, and will this allow for a range of tactics in battle beyond the usual 'tank rushing' approach?

JP: If you're talking about multiplayer, the depth there and the potential, the number of ways in which you can play is really awesome. We have people in the studio who've been playing for years and they still haven't explored all the different ways you can do it. We're shipping with fourteen maps and the terrain is very varied, everything from mountainous terrain to maps that have Flood in them that will serve as creeps to all different kinds of things that I won't discuss here that you'll discover as you play through the game. There's desert terrain, frozen terrain, and in addition you can play as both the Covenant and the UNSC, and you can choose one of three leaders with special leader powers in each of those races; each of those leader powers has a very distinct effect on rock-paper-scissors balancing within the game, and so you can see the matrix that starts building is really, really deep - you can play literally hundreds of different strategy components out of the gate, depending on who your opponent is. You might say "oh I've played this guy before and he always uses the Arbiter so I'm going to always do this," or maybe he mixes it up and it throws you for a loop - but then within all of the units that you can produce, most of them have considerable upgrade paths available and each upgrade path will add new, unique characteristics to that unit, not just increase their strength. It may give them an additional bonus against certain other types of enemies, it may strengthen their defences against certain forms of attack, we have an upgrade that makes marines able to heal themselves over time - there are dozens of upgrade combinations available on top of hundreds of ways to play based on which side and leader you choose so it's very deep.

GH: Do you feel that you've succeeded in programming intelligent AI opponents who vary their tactics enough to cause the player to adapt their tactics as well?

JP: I think they do and I think that if you play on the automatic difficulty setting when you're playing against the AI, you'll see that we do a great job of tuning the AI against your play style, so in addition to beginner, intermediate and advanced, we have self-scaling AI that monitors how good you are and will adjust itself accordingly. Certainly if you play through on Easy then it's probably going to be a cakewalk for experienced gamers, if you play through on Heroic or Legendary then it's going to be much harder and you'll see that the way in which the enemy units attack you is fairly interesting.

GH: Halo Wars is one of the best looking and best sounding RTS games I've ever seen, you've really captured the look and feel of the Halo series - was this high on your priority list when you began the project?

JP: Absolutely. Halo is the flagship franchise for Xbox, it's our premier first party title and as such it has an incredibly high bar for the kind of experience we would deliver in any genre or any multimedia experience, so you'll find a lot of folks at Ensemble who are really pleased with how everything turned out. The road we took to getting it there was really long and filled with a lot of checkpoints explicitly to say "does this look Halo, does it sound Halo, does it play Halo?" and we made changes to the game throughout the development process to make it move specifically in that direction because we didn't think it was quite there at various different points. Where we ended up, Bungie thinks it's a quality Halo offering and they're very tough customers to please - certainly from the Microsoft Games Studios perspective we are super proud with the work that Ensemble's done and we think it nails everything about a Halo game that it should.

GH: What are some of your favourite little features or touches within the gameplay, what are some of the things you see and you still think now, "that is so cool, the fans are going to go nuts for that."?

JP: I am a major fan of the Flood, I think they're creepy and weird, and I actually spent a lot of time personally thinking about what the Flood means to a Halo experience, how to best reveal it in the game. The Ensemble guys were awesome to work with, they were very open to my feedback, I was giving them a lot of feedback at certain points of the process and they were just great, so some of my favourite elements come from how we reveal the Flood within the game, the different kinds of Flood units that there are, the kinds of things that they do - there are some spectacularly cool animations we have where Flood stalks will pick off random Marines and toss them around and then throw them to the ground. This is absolutely one hundred per cent Ensemble's influence; they're known for ambient detail - in the Age of Empires games there is just a ton of strange little things going on in the background that make you feel like it's a living and vibrant world, and they carried that through in Halo Wars really, really well.

[At this point I'm told that we're nearly out of time and I have one last question - it was a tough call, as I had plenty more to fire at Jason, but I went with this one...]

GH: What plans do you have to support Halo Wars post release with downloadable content?

JP: There's nothing I can comment on specifically but a lot of people feel very passionately about continuing to move this series forward and so we're always looking for opportunities to do that. We have not yet committed to anything but as far as supporting the title goes, you may be aware that many of the folks from Ensemble have created their own new studio and we're partnering with them to do critical updates and patches, anything that can really be done to move forward.

GH: And just following on from that, if Halo Wars is as successful as I think it's going to be and you guys hope it's going to be, is there a possibility of this becoming a Halo series?

JP: We certainly hope so! Again, nothing I can comment on officially, but there is definitely a lot of momentum behind this within the studio, people are very excited about it, very jazzed, and we're always looking for ways to carry it forward.

GH: And you guys have got other ideas of time periods or locations or settings you can use for future RTS games in the Halo universe?

JP: Yes, one of the great things about the universe is that it spans over fifty thousand years, we can go back in time to when the Forerunners were still around, we can go forward in time, and even within just the window you see from Halo 1 to 3, the FPS games, there are many other stories to tell.

GH: Great, thank you very much indeed for your time, it's been a pleasure.

JP: Thank you!

As I left the Cabinet War Rooms, I had not only gained an insight into what it was like for the commanders of Britain's army in World War II, but also what it is like to take control of the battlefield and watch humanity's war against the Covenant unfold, with my every decision potentially making or breaking our campaign. It's a lot of pressure, that much is to be sure, but with a few skirmishes under my belt, I can't wait to continue the conflict when I get hold of my very own copy of Halo Wars - so make sure you check back in for our full review, and pre-order a copy while you're at it, because this is without doubt going to be one of the gaming highlights of 2009.

I'd like to thank Kate Szlendak, Jason Pace and everyone else from Microsoft for all their hard work and effort in making the Halo Wars Launch Event such a smoothly run and enjoyable day from start to finish.

Written by Geoff Holland for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).