Halo Wars 2: Awakening the Nightmare Review

"Lots and Lots of Popcorn"

Campaign

Halo Wars 2 is seemingly wrapped up as of the Awakening the Nightmare, a DLC expansion that brings back a familiar foe among other content. The core of the game is a new campaign that follows the Banished and more directly two brute brothers. It's an interesting perspective as we haven't really seen much development for these creatures. Not only that, we get a view of action directly from the other side of things and that they actually do have some heroic moments. That's not to say everything they do is great as they actually cause a big mishap, but they at least clean it up.

This story is matched with gorgeous Blur cinematics that just melt the eyes in glory and the gruesome Flood. I'm not sure how I feel about this enemy being reintroduced, but here they work very well as a unique new faction. The levels provided a solid amount of length to them and while a couple felt like the pacing was off, they were enjoyable. While they mostly were all smooth, I was at the end level and not entirely sure what was going on as some events were either slow or just weren't clicking as intended.

Aside from the main campaign, in multiplayer you'll get access to two new leaders Pavium and Voridus. These are those mentioned brute brothers from the story, each carry an interesting set of distinct units. The final portion of this is the awesome new Terminus Firefight that brings the classic cooperative Halo mode into the Wars series. Here up to three players work together against waves of enemies by building bases, defending a point and fending off whatever enemies happen upon them.

The Conclusion

Awakening the Nightmare is an excellent addition to Halo Wars 2 and it all wraps things up very well. It shows that one of the universe's worst enemies might still be at large and provides a different look at things through an interesting mini story. Few times do we get to see what the enemy side of the war is up to and the Banished might actually have some nice extra depth to them.

The campaign provides a decent length new story, you get a couple extra online leaders and the exciting new take on Firefight. It's a well setup package and aside from some levels taking a tad long and some issues with not knowing how things were supposed to go during the finale it was excellent.

Halo Wars 2 Review Review on Xbox One
Review Code Provided by Microsoft

Rating Overall: 8.5