The controls are all within easy reach of one hand, with W, A, S and D moving the camera and Q and E selecting local and global units respectively, while the mouse wheel can be used to cycle through individual units in a selection.
Considering that the title was originally designed for consoles, the move to mouse and keyboard has been relatively smooth - of course, a controller can still be used if you so desire. The biggest change comes in the form of being able to play on PC, thanks to the Xbox Play Anywhere program. In-game, even during moments of high-intensity action with countless on-screen explosions, the frame-rate remains fluid. Certain pre-rendered sequences from the original release had a tendency to be a little jumpy and it is pleasing to see that they have been smoothed out. However, the frame-rate is certainly more stable than its Xbox 360 counterpart. The Xbox 360 version was always quite good looking and it has aged well over the past eight years, although any graphical improvements are negligible and certain units, especially infantry, do look a little dated.
Halo Wars: Definitive Edition has been updated to take advantage of the more powerful Xbox One console, bringing the resolution up from 720p to 1080p. However, by cutting down the genre's usual clutter, simplifying resource management, and using a control system that gave players quick access to the things that matter, Halo Wars succeeded in being an RTS that focused more on action and felt completely at home on a console. The original game faced a lot of criticism over its lack of structures and units and many felt that it was a stripped-down RTS that lacked a lot of the depth for which the genre was normally known. It does, however, come packaged with all of the DLC that was available for the original, but that only adds a few handfuls of extra gameplay modes and maps for multiplayer and skirmishes. It still contains the same 15 missions from the original with no additional bonus missions, there are no new units or structures, and the difficulty hasn't been adjusted for better or for worse, Mission 4 on Legendary difficulty is still a daunting task. The Definitive Edition remains largely unchanged. New players don't require much knowledge of the universe as a whole and much of the important information is provided through the numerous cutscenes as well as a timeline that can be viewed from the main menu. It falls prior to the events of the upcoming sequel and stars a cast of previously unknown characters that allow the game to appeal to newcomers and fans alike.
In my opinion, comparing halo wars 1 to 2 isnt really fair given the time in between their releases as its obvious HW2 focused on multiplayer 2000x more than HW1 but sadly the game lost a lot of players and i guess 343I saw no point in continuing support for it.Set 20 years prior to the events of Halo: Combat Evolved, early in the war between the human-led UNSC and the alien Covenant, the plot of Halo Wars has no real bearing on the rest of the established universe. HW1 had actual objectives that felt realistic for you to fulfil. Halo was mainly a campaign game back in the days before multiplayer blew up and became what has been over the last few years with big esports companies doing tournaments and big esports teams joining, and so if you compared the two's campaigns youll see a massive difference, for example in HW1 the missions actually feel like missions (yes that sounds stupid but i cant explain it any other way lmao) but in HW2 the missions are almost the same as multiplayer, "go capture the nodes and get more score than Atriox" (this is just like regular old domination) or "build an army and go destroy that base" (this is just like a normal skirmish). You've also got to take into account the people who made the game obviously HW1 was made by bungie and HW2 by 343 Industries Halo Wars 2 is better in terms of playability like more leaders and units means more room for different strategies and more customisable options means that if you get bored of regular old HW2 then you can change some settings to make it more interesting.