My opinions and views on Halo Wars have, for the past couple weeks, been changing as often as my pants - once every few days - as new material comes out. As of right now, though, my enthusiasm, while still present, has reached its lowest point yet on its long descent from pre-E3 2007.

Originally, I was thrilled about Halo Wars. I'm an RTS fan, and I was looking forward to commanding armadas of hornets, fleets of scorpions, and long convoys of warthogs and marines. The first blow in that idea, however, came with the otherwise excellent 2007 E3 demo. I've always hated the idea of ONI coverups messing with established Halo canon, and when I saw that the flood would be featured in Halo Wars I lost a great deal of faith in the storyline. I still expected the game to be enjoyable, but any game that encountered the flood pre-Combat Evolved had a major downcheck against it in my mind.

Now we come to the demo and related announcements. I enjoyed the game, but was disappointed by the unit cap. But, I thought, that was just a demo thing - I'd be able to send my horde into battle in the full version, right? Wrong. The unit cap is, according to a recent Ensemble interview, the same in the full version as the demo. So much for the horde.

I'm now at a point where I actually expect the storyline to be great - the unauthorized "transformers" cinematic trailer renewed my faith in the story, and psyched me up for the game. But the news about the unit cap has put a very large damper on my enthusiasm. I end, now, in the opposite position as the beginning - huzzah for the story, but a quiet tear for the gameplay. I hope somehow to be proved wrong on the latter count, but I don't think that likely.

-LPG