REDMOND, Washington—Card economies are pretty much everywhere in video games right now, and Microsoft is leading that charge. The company's first major card stab was last year's Halo 5, whose "Warzone" mode revolves entirely around cards that can be purchased using in-game currency or real cash (and, in my opinion, the game suffers for it).

Clearly, the data shows that people are using, loving, and possibly even paying for cards, because Microsoft is now following up with two major card-economy games: this month's Gears of War 4, and next year's Halo Wars 2. We're concerned with Halo Wars 2 right now because Microsoft invited Ars to its Redmond Halo studio, 343 Industries, to see a reveal of the upcoming RTS's new "Blitz" mode.

Cards against humanity—if you play as the Banished, at least











Make no mistake: Blitz is all about the cards. But it's also another stab by the Halo Wars universe (this time with help from the Total War devs at Creative Assembly) to come up with a way to make RTS combat—and in particular, multiplayer matches—work in a console universe.

The mode drops players onto a static, symmetrical combat arena (dubbed "The Proving Grounds") with three capture points. Simply walking an army unit onto an unoccupied point captures it. Players aspire to maintain control of the points over time and fill a "capture" meter before opponents can do the same. Players start the match at a "base" at the edge of the map, but there's no resource mining or facility building happening in these, and they aren't meant to be defended, captured, or upgraded.

Instead, new units, attacks, and boosts are generated entirely by cards. Four cards appear at the bottom of the on-screen HUD at all times. Most of these are units, consisting of series characters and vehicles such as Spartans, Brutes, Warthogs, and Ghosts. Others offer one-off attacks and temporary buffs such as shields, stat boosts, or targeted missile strikes.

But you can't just tap a card to bring any of those into battle. You must also have enough "energy" points, and more powerful cards cost more energy. Every Blitz match begins by granting players a small amount of energy, along with a starting army (always five simple units, based on whichever "leader" character you pick at a match's outset), to get the ball rolling. Energy canisters appear on the battlefield at 90-second intervals, at one of about six known locations. These canisters must be destroyed by an army unit to be claimed. Depending on the mode, energy will also slowly tick upward at all times, which is particularly good if you face a full army-wipe situation.

Core gameplay, then, is about reacting to enemies and controlling turf as best as you can, given the limits and rush of card-based play. Like in most other RTS games, Halo Wars 2's units all have a rock-papers-scissors relationship with each other. But the semi-random nature of cards in your hand means you can't just manually invest in certain troop or tech trees when that seems like a good idea. The game is more reactive—like, do I divide my troops and send faster ones around to pick up energy? Leave units behind in control points to slow down foes' ability to take the point over (since control isn't ceded until an entire control point is emptied)? Or cluster your units as one giant army?

The other catch is that new card-based units can be generated back at your far-away base at full health, or they can be spawned anywhere in your "line of sight" at 50 percent health. This is the mode's other strategic wrinkle, as energy management doesn't get any easier if you're burning through half-health, but sometimes you just need a high-powered plane to turn the tide at a control point.

Get decked out







Between matches, players can manage the cards they've unlocked (which, by the way, are not spent or retired when used in a match) and create decks. Like in most CCGs, you're welcome to build a deck full of super-powered units, but you will need to build up more in-game energy to activate those cards during battle. So you're better off creating a balanced deck of wimps and titans alike. Some cards are leader-specific, and you can't mix up UNSC and "Banished" characters. (The Banished, by the way, are the evolved version of the Covenant that Halo Wars 2 players will encounter in the campaign.)

Like Hearthstone, players can earn in-game currency and cards just by playing or by completing tasks, including "daily challenges." Halo Wars 2's campaign mode will also unlock Blitz content. Unlike Hearthstone, cards can receive slight stat upgrades if players unlock enough duplicates of the same card—and these upgrades do not boost the price of a card.

While I enjoyed a brief taste of the mode's 2v2 battles, I also played Blitz's "Firefight" variant, which is much like the Halo shooter series' Firefight mode. Waves of enemies are trying to take over the three control points, and the mode ends when they've taken over enough of the control points to fill the AI's "control" meter to 100 percent. Multiple times, my solid progress in this mode was wiped because certain flying enemy ships got stuck on map geometry in such a way that I couldn't aim at or kill them. I look forward to testing this otherwise solid single-player mode (which also supports online co-op) once the bugs are cleared.

A little campaign... but no PvP?

Our studio visit also included hands-on time with what appears to be the second mission of Halo Wars 2's campaign mode. Ars gave this a spin on PC, as opposed to Xbox One, and... there's not much to report, to be honest. Campaign RTS modes typically guide players through various play and strategy styles that rarely carry over to live, online RTS play. Halo Wars 2's brief campaign peek was no different.

Thanks to some cutscene reveals, we got a longer look at Atriox, the gorilla-like leader of the game's "Banished" off-shoot of the Covenant. We also spent time with with Isobel, who is another UNSC artificial intelligence assistant à la Cortana. She's so moody and brooding in the cutscenes I saw that I couldn't help but ask, "Why would a military force employ this AI?" If you like overlong, dramatic cutscenes full of shouting, combat, and military posturing, Halo Wars 2 will be right up your alley. (As a fan of the '90s era of lengthy, cheesy cutscenes in RTS games, I'm all for it.)

The most interesting twist we noticed in this tutorial-ish mission is how units can be cycled through. Gamepad and keyboard users alike can use one-click shortcuts to select every unit on the active screen or every unit on the entire battlefield, along with a quick cycle at that point to all units of a particular type. Keyboard users get the additional bonus of function keys that can be assigned to specific units for higher-level play, but gamepad users don't get such granular control.

However, in its current state, Halo Wars 2 limits your selected units' speed based on the slowest participant. So if you have giant tanks and speedy Warthogs and you're eager to get to a control point, you'll have to click through about three or four times until you select only the Warthogs to get them speeding ahead. This was merely annoying in the campaign mode but absolutely abysmal to deal with in Blitz.

That's the kind of nitpick I can only hope is dealt with in time for the game's retail launch, along with a particularly tight camera zoom (which is made worse by how much space each unit takes up on the screen, compared to denser army crowding in other RTS games). The most worrying thing: our overly long studio visit to 343 Industries was padded with lengthy talks about the game's audio, story, and art design, along with a walk through the studio's "Halo Museum" of props and memorabilia. All of these felt to me like ways to distract us from the utter lack of pure RTS PvP play at this event. We only have the summer beta period to remark on at this point, and that didn't inspire much confidence at the time.

But Blitz does take a decidedly different tack with RTS combat. Whether you're a genre outsider or someone who wants to get in and out of RTS-like battles in about 12 minutes, there's something to sink your teeth into here. We're curious to see how the full card economy system, and its impact on core, beat-by-beat combat, works when the game launches in February 2017.

Listing image by 343 Industries