Genius Products Halo Interactive Strategy Game

this game is awesome. I can create my own campaign just like Dungeons and Dragons. they only down fall there are no flood character but the pieces are as big as a heroclix figure which means you can use heroclix figure to play as for additionally character card with Heroclix you'll have to make your own. Anyways. this product is fun, mind tactical thinking and relaxes your from the actual Halo xbox games. a must get for people who loves table tops tactical games.

I'm a fan of gaming in almost any medium and board games are always a classic form. After purchasing board games like Doom and Starcraft I quickly realized that video games do manage to translate quite well to this format. While this wasn't developed by the amazing Fantasy Flight Company, Genius Products managed to give us a decent game to play with a very interesting game board.The Halo board game seems to be heavily driven off the multiplayer death match kind of maps you find outside of the campaign setting of the game. That being said the game sequence isn't as engrossing as the video games story line. You can create some neat missions or campaigns to play yourself and there are already a couple pre-made missions for you to play through. One we played through was the Jericho campaign where the marines had to place the nuke in the Covenant staging area and then run back to your location and detonate the bomb. The game was fun and fast paced, but the way its designed feels like you are limited to only engaging in two player games. You can have more than two players, but you will have to have team games in the sense that there are only two sides; Covenant or Marines. I found this limitation somewhat disappointing because I think on the board game format you should easily be able to include other figures. Unfortunately this is precisely why I think the Haloclix system and game is way more fun and a better representative of the intensity found in Halo. The only downfall for some people with Haloclix is the fact that it's a collectible miniatures game, meaning you don't get all the pieces in a single box like you will with this Halo board game. You get enough pieces to play a game, but Haloclix requires you to collect more if you want to have truly epic level games.That all being said... the Halo board game was pretty easy to learn and it has some interesting options. The board itself isn't one giant hard surface like most board games; instead it is all plastic and cut in different pieces. This is simply great, in my opinion, because it allows you to create an unlimited amount of different boards for your characters to fight on. They're of varying sizes and you can even create bridges and so forth in connecting them, this was truly one of the most impressive aspects of this product. Reading through the rules you'll find that you can either use dice or use the interactive DVD. I'm a bit more akin to rolling dice over using the DVD, but we tried playing through the Jericho mission with the DVD. It gives the introductory parts a great atmosphere for starting the campaign, but after that it feels less interactive to me. Whenever you land on key parts where you get the option to change the weapons or get an item the DVD will randomly choose what's going on for you based on your character. This was okay, but I prefer physically doing it myself. One of the better parts was whenever combat was taking place, with the DVD you choose your character, your weapon, who your opponent is and then the DVD goes through an animation from the game, essentially "rolls" behind the scene and tells you an outcome.There are different ways to play through the missions in the sense that you have different difficulty levels. Playing on the easiest to learn setting it makes your characters quite weak and you wind up playing through the missions quite quickly. Essentially at the resolution of combat, if your character wins then the opponent's character dies or vice versa. The one shot one kill scenario is fast, but it feels kind of anti climactic and seems to remove some of the challenge for me. Now if you choose to play on the "legendary" setting, you can utilize a characters shields, like you have on the Spartans or Elites, and this will make the game much more challenging and more realistic to actual video game play.In the end the game is pretty decent. The high light was the board game format because I thought that was interesting. When it comes to overall game play I just think it's going to be dwarfed by Wizkid's Haloclix system, which was far more challenging and basically allows you to generate the same kind of scenario concepts like in the board game. I might have thought this game was a lot more fun if Haloclix didn't exist, so it's not like Doom, where it's my only exposure to a board game system. If you're a die hard Halo fan and can't resist owning this novelty item, like me, then I would recommend it. It is a decent time passer if you want to play some Halo. If, however, you've never heard of the Wizkid's Clix system, then I would recommend you take a look at that as well, because I think that captures the challenge of the game a little better. If you're feeling quite inventive you can just buy this for the board game pieces and use those with your clix so you can enjoy the modular terrain! You can even combine the clix into the DVD missions as well.

This board game is fun for all halo fans even if you have not played halo it is worth the buy. The game instructions give you some famous halo maps to play or you can create your own levels for limitless gameplay. A MUST HAVE FOR ALL HALO FANS!

bad

PROS:1. The actual pieces and parts are nice and some could be great additions to other games like Frag.2. Since the game is no longer supported it has gotten pretty cheap if you shop around. I got two sealed copies for under $40--including shipping!CONS:1. THE RULES... are painfully vague and disorganized. As someone who's played his fair share of other board and miniature games, this was an infuriating experience. If you check boardgamegeek there are numerous attempts to clarify or fix them but as packaged there's not really a game here. There's just too many things it doesn't address at all in the rules. Google it to find other reviews and make an informed decision.2. The game doesn't actually have all the terrain pieces to make the Slayer map it shows you in the manual...

So, I ordered this expecting to get a HALO board game that was accurate to the HALO plotline. I got it. Now, I also ordered it to expect the weapons to be as good as they were in the game comparatively. That did NOT happen. An assault rifle is not worse than an SMG. The battle rifle does less damage than an assault rifle, (unless you get headshots) but with more range. The carbine is not equal to the battle rifle. A UNSC Marine is NOT given a pistol and expected to fight. All of these nuisances pertaining to weapons really annoyed me, most of all the one where a human marine starts off with a pistol and NOTHING ELSE. Furthermore, a marine is BETTER than a Grunt in every way, not EQUAL. The creators of this game either hadn't played HALO very much, or were willing to bend the HALO plotline to the point where the units and weapons weren't realistic to the game. Remember when one Marine was killed by one Grunt? The creators of this game seemed to. In order to remedy this, I actually edited the cards for the units myself, although nothing could be done for the marine figure holding a pistol. If you want to preserve your memories of HALO's weapons and unit statistics, you will be sorely dissapointed. The gameplay itself is fun if you get around all of the weapons being unrealistic, which probablay only bothers nerds like myself. Also, do NOT keel your figures in storage above 60 degrees farenheight, or they will melt.

My son is a big halo fan but I hate that he wants to always play video games! I was hoping it would peel him away from the tv, and it did! He loves it! It allows him to be as creative as he wants and still makes it a game of strategy! He wishes there were more pieces and I've heard there are expansion packs so I highly recommend this to anyone who likes to play Halo and likes board games.

My Son freaked out over this halo game... loves it! And for a used collectable game, it was in very good, almost new condition. Highly recommend this seller.