Halo Wars demo arriving in four weeks

By Oli Welsh Published 8 January, 2009

Series has sold 25 million copies.

More droplets of news trickle out of Microsoft's rather dry CES keynote address in Las Vegas last night: Xbox 360 strategy spin-off Halo Wars is to get a demo on 5th February (as reported by IGN and GameSpot).

That's four weeks from now, and three weeks ahead of its release. That release date is now the 28th February in the US, three days earlier than previously announced - but we assume the European date of the 27th February remains unchanged.

Bach reminded everyone that expansion pack Halo 3: ODST is coming out this year, and trumpeted total sales of 25 million copies for the Halo series to date.

When he wasn't blowing smoke up Bungie's rings or making games with children, Bach spent the the presentation slapping himself on the back for selling lots of consoles, getting 17 million active users on Xbox live (three million in the last three months), increasing the size of friends lists by 33 per cent since introducing Avatars in November, and accounting for 80 per cent of download sales in the war of the multi-format music games. Allegedly.

There was also some stuff about a new Windows. Viva Las Vegas.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

You may also like...

Comments (10) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • angerisagift #1 3 years ago

    Will there ever be a decent console strategy game that works with a controller? Not in my opinion.

  • Thunderbolt #2 3 years ago

    I'm a total Halo fanboy but I'm not sure about all this RTS stuff

    Sure on a PC works great but I recently played the Red Alert demo and the control system was terrible.

    But maybe the demo will sway me.

  • ryohazuki1983 #3 3 years ago

    Be good to play the demo, i'm also unsure about the game.

  • Eraysor #4 3 years ago

    25 million copies for only three games (five if you count PC versions) is pretty damn impressive.

    And EndWar is a great console RTS but that's probably because it makes controller use almost nonexistent.
    Edited by 1 at 08/01/09 @ 15:57

  • Yossarian #5 3 years ago

    A demo is good news for those of us who love the universe but are sceptical about an RTS.

  • spitfire1945 #6 3 years ago

    angerisagift: I'm not a big RTS fan, but I tried the Tom Clancy's Endwar demo from the Marketplace and I have to say that voice commands do works pretty well, so that might be an option for the future, but as you say the joypad it will always be the worst controlling method!

    Let's see if Ensemble Studios pulled out a trick or faced the same struggle everybody else had with RTS on consoles!

  • angerisagift #7 3 years ago

    Yeah, I was on the EndWar beta. It did a pretty good job, but I have to say, still doesn't compare to a quality mousey clickfest like a Rise of Nations or Age of Mythology/Empires on the PC...those were the good old days...

  • SilentScream #8 3 years ago

    Yeah, I think that PC's are best for RTS.

    It was a good idea bringing them to console, but it doesn't work, unless you could plug a mouse and keyboard into your console, and then change the whole of the controls to work on keyboard...

    Halo Wars on PC would work out better me thinks.

  • bratmandu #9 3 years ago

    Prediction - balls.

  • LazyDan #10 3 years ago

    I'm hoping it'll do for console RTS games what Goldeneye and the original Halo did for console FPS games in terms of controls. No one thought FPS' were right on consoles until they happened.