At E3 we get to see a bunch of games (and sometimes play) which aren’t going to be released for quite some time, games people are anxiously waiting for. Halo Wars is one of those and we finally got to see the first in-game footage of this RTS which is (according to the developers) going to be an X360 exclusive. In other words, it’s not planned for PC. We can already say this, the first impressions of this game were astonishing.

In room 614 of the Viceroy hotel in Santa Monica Chris Rippy (Producer) and Graeme Devine (Developer) of Ensemble Studios (Age of Empires) show us some first details of Halo Wars. The game will fit perfectly in the big storyline of the Halo franchise and is played in the year 2531, twenty years before the first Halo. The singleplayer campaign follows the events surrounding a big ship during first contact between the USNC and the Covenant. They’re promising many environments and planets, but the demo showed a big forest and locations which feel very familiar.

The feeling of ‘familiarity’ goes on when a ship, guided by Hawks (a new type of unit which looks a lot like modern day attack helicopters), drops a couple of infantry units at the Marine base. This base doesn’t only look great, but it also has a huge amount of activity. Think about welding grease monkeys, smoke-puffing rocket silo’s, soldiers doing physical exercises, and much more. True eye-candy.

The dev’s showed that off a bit and also stated that they have already been working on the game for two-and-a-half years now with six months dedicated to controls-development only. The fact that those controls are doing their job was also shown with a brief demo of how they work. You’ll use the left-thumbstick to drag your pointer and when pressing A while on a unit, you’ll select that unit (you can also double-tap A to select every unit of that type or hold it and drag your pointer to ‘paint’ the units you want to select). Putting down buildings and making selections will mostly happen thru the use of radial-menu’s while the D-pad will take care of the important short-cuts. It looks like it’s going to be smooth playin’.

Enough of the bla-bla, time for action! Some human infantry-units are being chopped to pieces with a lot of light- and color spectacle by Covenant grunts and Brutes with their needlers and blasters. No need for panic! Some extremely maneuverable Warthogs (including passengers and their typical way of driving, skidding around corners) are coming to the rescue, shooting and squashing the remaining Covenant. The Warthogs then jump smoothly over a ravine and seconds later we’re already seeing more enemy troops, including Scorpions, Phantoms, Ghosts and Wolverines (these are very powerful ground-to-air units). And guess what, it’s all still looking spectacular and finished up to the smallest detail.

There’s also some huge unit called the Scarab, it’s some sort of mega-buglike robot from the Covenant troops which has an über-laser to latterly burn away all opposition. Fortunatly there’s some sort of space-attack causing a mega explosion, ending the battle and with it the demo.

More details are being spilled bit by bit. The Energy Sword for example. We’ll certainly see that in Halo Wars, there’ll be a co-op in multiplayer, you’ll have to gather recourses, upgrade you’re way through a tech-tree, … Although the game already looked quite done, we’ll only be able to play it in 2008 (whether it’s early or late 2008, they wouldn’t tell).

Let’s pray this game has its release soon because these moving images have shown that this game will certainly not have to step aside for Halo 3.