Over at the official Halo Wars website there’s a recent forum post that gave an update about some Microsoft bigwigs that came to see a playable version of Halo Wars. Since the post went up there’s been an image being ‘decrypted’ at the end of the post. The image is finally fully visible, and it has revealed one of the new vehicles that will appear in the game – the UNSC Sparrowhawk.
This looks like a relative of the Pelican but designed more for offensive duties – a bit like a futuristic Apache helicopter. In the image you can see that the vehicle has a chin-mounted gun, two double-barrelled cannons on wing mounts, and three rocket pods under each wing too. It’s not clear how much elevation these vehicles can get – perhaps they’ll hover more than fly.
I’m beginning to really look forward to Halo Wars. I like RTS games, and had a great time with Age of Empires, which Ensemble also made. There’s no release date mentioned yet for it, but it sounds like they’re making good progress.