Ensemble: Halo Wars demo before release

Gamers tend to be (understandably) cautious when it comes to real time strategy games on consoles. The reason for this is simple: RTS games on consoles have been uniformly bad, with the (arguable) exception of Battle for Middle Earth II and Command & Conquer 3 on the Xbox 360. Even with those games, however, the controls are far from perfect, which becomes abundantly clear in later levels. Halo Wars hopes to change all that, or so we were told by Ensemble. Still, we'd like a bit of a safety net if you please. Lucky for us, the folks from Ensemble told us during our Halo Wars E3 presentation that there is a demo on the way. According to producer Chris Rippy, the demo will arrive "for sure before the game comes out." While we were generally impressed with the Halo Wars presentation, our one nagging concern was the control, so it's nice to know that we'll all be able to try before we buy. Halo Wars touches down in 2008.