Halo Wars: Definitive Edition

I love it, it's simple, it's fun, it's captivating and it's halo. I would recommend it to anyone that loves strategy and halo and building stuff.

A fairly simple RTS even for its day, but it's charming in its simplicity and pretty addictive to boot, it doesn't feel shallow or unfinished at all. Artistically it's extremely faithful to the feel of the original Halo games (back then they were the only Halo games lol) in visuals, sounds, and overall tone/mood. The PC port is also a little better than the original version I remember playing so many years ago, they added some new hotkeys (including control groups) and slightly improved the graphics. I especially love the skulls and alternative gamemodes, not a lot of RTS games go beyond the basic KOTH/annihilation gamemodes and not a lot of games in general have quirky difficulty modifiers. My favourite game type is Reinforcement where your resources are consumed automatically every minute (on average, there's some random variation) in exchange for a random assortment of units. Even as an RTS veteran, I find Halo Wars to be a nice break from other games because its simplicity makes it so easy to pick up. It makes a good depression game in that respect, doesn't take much energy to get started here. Also, being able to see where your allies are looking on the minimap is a nice quality of life feature that I wish was in other strategy games.