I have been playing Halo Wars on Steam, and wow this game did not age well. Not only is the port bad, but I didn't remember how extremely simplistic the game is to compensate for the original Xbox controller controls that it had. It expects you to micro a lot of units, especially their powers, to be effective at the game, but also simultaneously is poorly made so that oftentimes I found myself more prone to just diving my army into the enemy base, using my damage powers indiscriminately on the enemy base, then letting my army duke it out and eating whatever losses I got. I also found unit pathing to be pretty bad; in particular, units would get hung up on other units and structures all the time, even when there is clearly more than enough room for them to navigate, but the controls are bad enough that trying to micro units was pointless and you might as well just let them die if they're going to die instead of trying to move injured units to the rear line so you can try to save them for later. Also, the Spirit of Fire power wheel is busted and the scrolling is borderline not functional, so the powers are functionally worthless and not worth bothering with. You will spend so much time fucking with aiming the powers, that you would have been better off not using it at all.
There's really no strategy or planning involved, just make lots of units until you hit the cap, then go roll over the enemies without a concern. Really the only "strategy" is fighting against flood, but unfortunately that strategy boiled down to never sending infantry against the flood ever, because you will just lose your whole army, then have to kill the space zombies on top of the base you were fighting before. Even though ODST troopers are the human "super unit", there's no particular point to using them after the introduction of the flood, unless you are going to station infantry in a garrisonable structure for money or power. In the end, that turns into "never use infantry ever", just out of pragmatism.
The story and characters, what little I interacted with, are also awful. There's tons of Marvel tier "well that just happened!" style of non-jokes, and it seems like none of the main cast takes anything that is happening seriously. When dozens of marines are slaughtered by an unknown alien lifeform, that isn't a problem, that's just a chance for some more glib non-humor that destroys the mood and shows that nobody in universe is taking what is happening seriously. I hated everything involved with the characters so much, especially Serena, that I just started skipping all cutscenes.
One particularly bad element is the introduction of the Flood. The game introduces the Flood at the same time that it introduces the mobile barracks, the Elephant, but the game makes the infantry functionally obsolete that same mission since any infantry you field will be instantly eaten by the flood. Why even bother having that in the game if the game's own mechanics negates any utility that the unit could have? Unlike a lot of other games, which try to give a mission or two for a new unit to shine and show you its benefits, this one instead goes out of its way to show you that the new unit you just got is going to be basically worthless and not worth building. I have never heard of an RTS game purposefully sabotaging itself like this.
I was originally playing this to get Halo Wars 2, but this game is so much worse than I remember that I won't be getting Halo Wars 2 after all. It's to the point that I am on the last mission, and seriously wondering to myself if I want to even finish the game, or just uninstall it and try to forget about the money I wasted on buying it.
