just got the game today and played through the first 3 levels.

some thoughts:

while it's pretty cool that the marines, scorpions, warthogs and hornets are playable, the other units like the flamethrowers and cobra somehow scream STARCRAFT!!!! to me

hero units are pretty much invincible, esp Sarge Forge and the Spartans, if any of them dies, just bring some friendlies next to them and they'll be revived. pretty nifty though if Forge dies in his warthog, he gets resurrected as an ODST, i think, equipped with a shotgun instead of the usual assault rifle.

spartans in mission mode come in various armaments, from chain guns, missile launchers, spartan lasers, sniper rifles and they got indiv names to boot! they still retain their shields and can jack vehicles.

it's pretty weird how the game mentions that on a 1 on 1 basis, the UNSC units are stronger than the Covenant. if that's the case, why in blazing h*ll was the UNSC fighting a losing battle?

mac guns are fun to use though costly and kinda limited in ammo, much like an ion cannon blast from C&C, but the splash damage is horribly pathetic... it pretty much only destroys the point where u aim it at.

as for the multiplayer parts, i've played the skirmish with all 6 leaders.

UNSC has Capt Cutter, Sarge Forge and Dr Anders for leaders. UNSC has like uber units which are super versions of the usual unit and an unique unit and bombing ability.

Cutter has access to ODSTs which are super marines armed with shotguns, the Mac Gun and the Elephant which is a mobile barracks of sorts. quite nice that they included the elephant that was available in one of the multiplayer maps in Halo 3.

Forge has Grizzlies which are super scorpions, carpet bombing and the Cyclops. Cyclops is basically a building killer and can heal buildings and vehicles. unique ability is to grab something to use to pummel the enemy with (those stone giants in Warcraft 3 anyone?). quite a useless melee unit, imho whose only redeeming feature is the healing ability once it's researched.

Anders has Hawks which are super Hornets armed with laser guns, a cryo blast (sooo RA3) and a Gremlin which is like an EMP blasting vehicle that is only useful against vehicles and useless against pretty much anything else.

Covenant has the Prophet of Regret, the Arbiter and the Brute Chieftain. diff from UNSC is that these leaders actually appear as playable units each with unique abilities. These abilities can be activated at will, but costs $$ to maintain it. The Scarab is also available at 20 units and is basically pretty much invincible once built, most units and buildings are dead within 1 shot...

Regret has access to Elite Honour Guards armed with the plasma swords and a cleansing ability which is like a directable ion cannon which gains additional damage over time when fully researched. Honour guards can be equipped with cloaking abilities for sneaky kills. Regret starts out with plasma rifles and when fully upgraded, has fuel rod cannons, can fly and has 2 remote protectors.

Arbiter has access to Suicide Grunts which are the typical grunt squad minus the Elite and has the special ability to... commit suicide by running into enemies with plasma grenades on hand. Arbiter's kinda cool with 2 plasma swords and his special ability is kinda fun to play with, he goes into some sort of rage mode and the player can move him around with the left thumbstick and use the right thumbstick to attack. He regains health with each kill in this mode. A permanent cloak upgrade can be purchased.

Brute Chieftain has the Brute Choppers replacing the Ghosts and access to a Brute squad which consists of 2 Brutes armed with Brute shots and upgradable jump packs. Kinda resembles Tartarus from Halo 2. Hammer resembles the ones used by Brute Chieftains in Halo 3. Special ability is a vortex which sucks in enemies and can be controlled by the player. it's ended by pressing the A button which causes a large explosion whose damage is kind of dependent on the amount of debris sucked into it. The hammer also retains it's deadliness in that it pretty much kills infantry out right when fully upgraded with an added stun, AOE attack, instant KO to stunned units and the ability to pull in units towards the Chieftain.

Nice one bro, you playing this one the 360 yeah? How are the controls using the gamepad? Easy? Hard? Troublesome?
I was tempted to get the game during the IT show, but held off lol.

the circle menu is pretty irritating at first, but once u get used to it, it's pretty intuitive.

Left bumper selects all units all over the map, right bumper selects all units in ur field of view.
the right trigger cycles through the various unit types in the massive collection to issue indiv orders to that particular unit type only.

for e.g, when I have a group of Warthogs and Marines, the right trigger will select the marines and warthogs sequentially depending on how many times u pull the right trigger. then when u issue a command with say the warthogs selected, only the warthogs will perform the command.

the lower d-pad is pretty useful, pressing on left cycles through ur bases, right brings u to the various map alerts during gameplay, up brings up ur leader powers(UNSC) or selects ur leader (Covenant), down cycles through the various unit clusters around the map

u can try the downloading the demo first? that's what i did, played through the demo first before i got the game as i was pretty on the fence abt it prior to playing the demo.

overall pretty playable, though the unit path movements could be improved a little, if i issue 5 seperate commands to 5 unit types in a big group, everything goes haywire, infantry block warthogs, warthogs block scorpions, scorpions block everything.... even in a big empty space.... gotta issue a sub command with a short interval in between (though i tend to micro manage abit too much)


just started playing against the flood in campaign, super irritating siah, flood infects infantry pretty quickly, but are still pathetic against flamethrowers. then there's this flood tower that keeps on shooting flood spores to infect ur units. I lost 8 Marine and 2 Flamethrower squads even before I could reach the tower... it's got pretty insane range and the flood buildings keep on regenerating after u kill them......

Wah... sounds fierce!
I'm quite the idiot in RTS games, only one I ever played was Starcraft, rest of my games are usually FPS or TPS, heheh. I think I will get and try it la, since it's part of the Halo-verse.

this one no need to worry about resources since it's infinite once u build a resource building.
but the speed at which u get it depends on how many resource buildings u build and whether u've upgraded them.
coz one of the things i hate most abt playing RTS is the part abt resource gathering, be it from a finite or infinite source... but that's part and parcel of RTS games

also, there's a unit cap for both UNSC(campaign & multi) and Covenant(multi) though for some reason, the Covies have 10 extra units to play with, though it's probably due to the scarab taking 20 units to build.

just completed the campaign mode, and then i realised, i missed out on a majority of skulls and black boxes along the way.....

argh, gotta replay the whole thing again...

black boxes can be found at a specific area on the map, skulls, u have to complete some objective like killing a said number of enemy units

I can't believe I'm this sucky at this game!!
Hell, I play Tiberium Wars way way better than this

where u stuck at?

certain levels can be quite tricky to complete, especially hate the timed missions

I just finished the mission on rescuing Arcadian citizens after nearly 9 tries

that mission, hated that one.

did u try splitting ur hornets into 2 grps at shuttles 1 & 2? dun bother protecting no 3, it will always get blown up.
den u can use forge's warthog to secure the 2 base sites to build more hornets.

the heal power can also be used on the shuttles in the event that it gets pretty damage.

after this mission, u'll be controlling spartans for pretty much most of the remainder of the campaign. they totally rock. can use them on their own or can use them to jack covenant vehicles (if it is destroyed, just jack another) or u can probably use them to commandeer ur own vehicles (though i prefer not to owing to the unit cap)

that eventually what i did after reading some walkthrough.

well, still got a lot of missions to plough thru. Time to Forge ahead.

only 15 missions in total for campaign, it'll be over faster than you know. some of the missions are pretty short, i averaged about like at 40 min per mission barring those with timers.

haha the flood still retains it's "heat" vulnerabilities from the original series, so the flamethrowers are superb against them, though they suck at pretty most anything else since they've got superbly short range and equally weak health though their stun grenades are useful for stunning enemy infantry if ur overwhelmed