Straturdays: Halo Wars[Heroic] missions 01 & 02 | Alpha Base & Relic Approach
0And straturdays wins the 2nd place award for "first halo content" on the channel, beat by quite some time by video weirdness, if you count 343's works. (No I'm not going to call them whatever they rebranded themselves as, you make the blunders you take the responsibility.)
A scant two years after the fight was finished, 343 and Ensemble studios, (yes the "age of" Ensemble studios) brought us Halo Wars. The title released to modest praise from gamers and critics alike. A tad shallow for the real-time-strategy genre, but complex and the best selling RTS title for consoles at the time. Rather than individual units like most RTS (aside from the lord of the rings console games and Warhammer:Battlemarch), most infantry are trained as squads rather than individuals. Set 20 or so years before the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, this game chronologically precedes all titles in the franchise and remains (mostly) accurate to the Bungie canon and aesthetic.
For years growing up, I had been a Starcraft boy. In Starcraft, if a hero dies you lose the mission. Game over, restart from the last save. And seeing as I was and am badly ADHD with no medication, that meant restarting the mission entirely cause there is no save. Ensemble brought over a mechanic from their Age of Mythology title, in which hero units didn't die, but were incapacitated and slowly regenerated HP. At roughly half health, you could move a friendly unit near the hero to get them back up and in the fight. Which is a very good thing, cause you definitely need hero power to get through some of these missions. Once upon a time, I was able to 1v1 a legendary AI with ease as any faction. I've not played in so long, I can't manage that these days, so we're gonna play on heroic rather than legendary.