To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more

Halo wars 2 – release date, trailer and beta

Play Halo Wars 2 today with a week-long Xbox One beta

Long-awaited RTS sequel Halo Wars 2 was not only shown today at Microsoft’s E3 2016 keynote, the game is available to play in beta form as of today. A week long beta on Xbox One can be downloaded and played as of now by any Xbox Live Gold member. 

A short video of the game was shown, after a very fancy cinematic sequence. It looks as you’d expect, with Covenant and UNSC forces squaring off across colourful alien environments. The crew and forces of The Spirit of Fire return from the 2009 original, this time up against an enemy force known as The Banished, commanded by a clever and ingenious commander.

The game is being developed by British studio, and RTS experts, Creative Assembly. So we can expect a serious RTS experience with plenty of nuances in amongst the action. Beyond that we don’t know much about the game, so head over to Xbox Live and download the beta now.

The full game will be coming to both Xbox One and Windows 10 on the 21st of February 2017, so there’s still some time for the developers to polish any rough edges before the launch. It will come under the Xbox Play Anywhere initiative, so you’ll be able to play across Xbox One and PC, co-op and competitvely, with save games transferring via the cloud, all for the price of a single game.

Read more

News