Reviews for Halo Wars come pouring in. “Impressive”
Reviews for Ensemble’s last game Halo Wars are starting to come in. First up we have IGN who rated Halo Wars an “Impressive” 8.4/10. IGN’s UK arm rated the game 8.2 and in Australia 9.0! In each Halo Wars received an editor’s choice award! You can read the IGN reviews here: http://uk.xbox360.ign.com/articles/955/955576p3.html
Current MetaCritic Score: 83
http://www.metacritic.com/games/platforms/xbox360/halowars
Great scores so far for a great game!
Bruce Shelley discussing the studios closure – LIVE Blog + Video
Brian Leahy is blogging LIVE from the DICE summit where Bruce Shelley is on stage right now discussing the Ensemble closure. You can read the blog here:
The blog brings to light more information as to why Microsoft could close down such a great studio. Some of these reasons being that the studio became too fragmented as there were more teams working on different ideas and that maybe they lost communication with Microsoft.
WATCH BRUCE:
IGN have video footage of Bruce’s DICE talk here: http://video.ign.com/streaming/dice-2009/index.html Unfortunately at the time of writing the player is down but hopefully it will be up soon. Remember to skip to 4pm as that was the time Mr Shelley was presenting.
GAMASUTRA:
Gamastura’s report of Bruce’s speech can be read here: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=22402.
It would seem that Ensemble had problems diversifying and that it created separate teams too late in the process. Bruce Shelley believes that this lead to the studio being out of sync with Microsoft. A sad speech. Though, Bruce speaks positively of new Ensemble start up studios. Robot and Bonfire.
