I loved Halo Wars 2 when it was released earlier this year. I put hundreds of hours into the Blitz-mode collecting gold medals and skulls in the campaign and played Firefight with my friends as if we were obsessed. Then I quit playing. Mostly because Blitz only had 1 small map. But anyway, the first expansion was announced during this years E3-fair and and I quickly developed a urge to jump in and pick of a few more campaign missions in the good'ol halo universe. Which is exactly what I did.
In Halo Wars 2: Awakening the Nightmare we no longer play as UNSC, but instead as one of the core-games villains, the Brute alliance called "The Banished" and it is only their perspective that we get this time around. The expansion takes place sometime after Halo Wars 2, which in turn takes place after Halo 5: Guardians. The Brutes face of with the Flood for the first time and anybody who has played Halo before, knows what chaos this clash would bring.
The Flood are annoying little bugs that need's to be exterminated. Anybody who has played Halo before knows what I am talking about.
But it is not the core-games main antagonist Atriox that we get to play, but instead one of the Brute-bro's Pavium or Voridus. During 5 missions I get to take part of what happens when a Brute is crossed with a Flood. We'll have to flee in crazy panic and fight back the monsters as we try to survive. Just as in Halo Wars 2 there are cinematic-sequences created by Blur that are so gorgeous one just wants to pause and stare at the marvel of the gaming world at more than one occasion. When it comes to cinematic sequences, Blur are kings.
But even if 5 missions sounds a bit poor on paper, it actually is not that bad. Sure, 10 missions would have been much better, but every missions takes about 30-45 minutes, which makes the total game length much longer then one could expect from only 5 missions. And with that, all 5 missions are explosively fun and unique - actually better then the missions from the main game. It's all about some task that need to be done and while you try to solve that task, 2 more always pops up on the mini map. It makes me feel alert and always think one step ahead and it reminds me of the campaign from Starcraft II, in a very good way. There are 5 good missions and even if it may not bee as fun to face off as against USNC, the Flood still feels like fresh and new enemies and are a quite enjoyable to obliterate. One thing I noticed was that the difficulty level was somewhat turned up. I started of playing on "hard" but found myself having problems already on the first missions, which resulted in lowering to "normal" instead, where I still felt challenged. This is something that I applaud because I had to turn up the difficulty a lot in the last Halo campaign to get the same sense of challenge as I get from "normal" this time around.
The game's 5 missions are very diversified and fun to play.
There is one problem with the campaign in my opinion though, a pretty large problem actually. Because the Flood always attacks in large clusters this means that there is a lot of little aliens on the screen at once. It is something my Xbox One X doesn't really pull-off, and some of the missions almost become unplayable during a few seconds at it's worst. As a small bandage we get awesome music at least. It is so good I would almost crown it to being the best soundtrack of this year, after Destiny 2 of course. When a mission starts going towards it's end and there are so many aliens on my screen that the FPS hits somewhere between 15-20 frames per seconds, I can at least lean back and enjoy some of the superb music. Better then nothing I suppose.
Once the campaign is finished there are new leaders to conquer in the Blitz mode and the new Terminus Firefight mode to try out. Here it is me and two players that need to work together to defend against incoming squads of enemies, where the Flood of course are involved. It is a very small change from the old Firefight, but still gives us enough to make it feel exciting, but a few more maps would have helped. The new leaders are also quite original and to learn different abilities online is something I am looking forward to during the coming weeks.
Too much characters on screen can bring down the FPS quite a lot, to much in my opinion. But it doesn't happen to often.
As a first expansion Halo Wars 2: Awakening the Nightmare does a real good job in turning the core gaming experience up-side-down and offer something that feels new even though it may not be. I would have loved to see a couple of more missions and maybe the Flood as a playable race in Blitz, but with that said the 5 missions in the campaign are varied, grand and really challenging. Everything is neatly tied together with some awesome cinematic sequences and wonderful music and gives us a reason to play the Blitz again. I feel satisfied with Awakening the Nightmare and really hope that there will come more content for Halo Wars 2 in the near-future.