It’s not often that a game migrates from smartphones to consoles. We are more used to seeing it the other way round.
But when the game has the fan base of the Halo series, and when it features a crucial story link, it starts to make sense.
Halo: Spartan Assault is something of a departure for the Halo series, renowned for its crunchy first-person shooter goodness. Spin-off game Halo Wars dipped into skirmish strategy, but Spartan Assault enters the field of the third-person, arcade-style shooter with a bird’s-eye perspective.
In the Haloverse, it takes place between the events of Halo 3 and Master Chief’s re-emergence in Halo 4. You have the option to play either Spartan Commander Sarah Palmer, or Spartan Davis.
The game was released on Windows 8 and Windows Phone last summer, on the Xbox One at Christmas, and launched on the Xbox 360 in the UAE last Friday. The intervening time has proved fruitful for the developers.
“We have got data we have collected from mobiles, so we have been able to tweak some of the gameplay. We can see the number of attempts people have at missions — you can see it’s X amount of time. You can see where people have finished too quickly, so we’ve been able to tweak that,” 343 Industries senior producer Graeme Jennings said.
“We have added a co-op mode. We have added console-specific content such as new graphics and sounds.”
The game is built around a series of 30 single-player missions intended to last five to 10 minutes, a legacy of its game-on-the-go mobile origins, to which 343 have added five co-op missions for the 360.
“When we started, the intention was to produce a touch-based game for phone and tablet,” said Jennings. “We wanted to branch out.
“Then we found there was a huge demand for this from Halo console players, traditional players. We did it on the PC.” He added: “We realised how it would play on consoles, so we realised we should probably do it on the 360 as well.”
When it launched on the mobile platform, Spartan Assault attracted some controversy for its microtransactions, with one reviewer — Game Informer’s Kyle Hilliard — saying it felt like part of the game was being withheld.
While microtransactions are still present in the console version, Jennings is keen to emphasise that the model has changed, and that they are not necessary to the game. The mobile version, he said, had been the studio’s first experience with microtransactions.
“It still exists, but you will be able to get things with XP [experience points earned in play]. They are optional add-ons for fun.”
Jennings declined to give any information about Halo 5, the anticipated next instalment of the second Halo trilogy. Microsoft has yet to announce the game is in development, but unconfirmed rumours are circulating that the game is slated for a late 2015 release.
