That time that separates Halo Wars 2 from its first delivery is nothing compared to the twenty-eight that have passed in the game world itself. Almost three decades in which the crew of the Spirit of Fire has remained peacefully asleep until a signal
from the UNSC alerts the AI on board to wake up all the Marines. The cinema, as well as other media, has taught us that this type of situation never waits for anything good, so we can prepare to draw the weapons and expect problems.
The plot puts us directly in the Ark, the Forerunner facility that serves for the manufacture of those super weapons of mass destruction that are haloes.
Although the development of the campaign is far from being directly related to the adventures lived in other main chapters of the series, this location and other details (as is the case of the comments that Spartans give us when receiving orders) will direct our thoughts
towards known stages. But returning to the situation of the main plot, in this case we will see an ally camp that has been attacked by a new force in discord: the
Exiles, an army that rejects all authority beyond its leader, a brute called Atriox that in another time and very reluctantly served the Covenant.
His fierceness in combat and his leadership skills have allowed him to survive always in spite of carving very powerful enemies, and now
he wants to take control of the installation 00 to sow chaos throughout the galaxy. With a halo in their power, nothing will be safe in many light years around.
These are, in broad strokes, the details that put us at the very beginning, presenting on the way to one of the most important characters in the game: Isabel, an AI with very valuable information about the enemy we are facing. We are also in contact with Jerome,
Alice and Douglas, the three Spartans who will help the troops of the Spirit of Firein its mission to prevent the Exiles from fulfilling the will of their general, acting as heroes during combat. Going into details about the
development would gut one of the attractions of the game, but we can say that it will offer certain interesting moments for lovers of the Halo universe.
However, it should be noted that the importance of everything that is narrated here is summarized in a few strokes at the beginning and end of the game, leaving little space for deepening in history and characters, always with honorable exceptions.
The main plot is spread over twelve missionsthat make up the campaign mode, which can take us around nine hours of effective game.
This duration is very variable depending on the level of difficulty and the secondary objectives that we choose to perform, although it is true that readiness plays in our favor to achieve the highest scores at the end of each level.
The total number of missions, in any case, seems somewhat lacking, and really there are aspects that are resented by it: the curve of difficulty gives some
somewhat surprising lurches, because the feeling that we have little time at the controls will chase us well into the story development.
This is contributed by the lack of a gradual inclusion of the various functions and types of objectives that can be presented to us, which could have been resolved with a greater number of short missions.
For everything else, the campaign offers an attractive development , with a variety of situations enough to keep us hooked until the end and repeat missions seeking to improve our results, as well as obtain the various extras in the form of skulls and documents.
Also, of course, the search for major challenges in the most demanding difficulties will be an incentive for the most experienced players. The truth is
that the adjustment of them responds very well to their descriptions, and any level that suits our abilities will give us moments of respite and suffering in equal parts (except the legendary, which does not give truce).
One of the important aspects of Halo Wars 2, as it happened with the first, is its strategy game condition. And this is so both for belonging to a saga of a radically different genre, as for coming out in consoles, knowing the doubts that always wakes up the use of command
when giving orders in real time is about. The truth is that already in the first Halo Wars a good job was done in adapting to pad control, and this
second part follows a very similar line. We can not say that we forget the absence of a keyboard and a mouse, which will always be the ideal combo, but without a doubt a good result has been
achieved with the compression of all the possible functions in the buttons that we have in Xbox One. Of course, this requires practice and a period of accommodation, since in many cases we have very diverse commands and functions located
on the same keys, having to double-click or enter different modes to distinguish it. The shortcuts are not as immediate as on a keyboard, but there are also many present. We must say that in the PC version we can also use command if we prefer it.
