News · 5 Jun 2013 · MTW Editorial Team
The Halo franchise is finally headed to Windows Phone as an exclusive first party game from Microsoft’s 343 Industries Studio in collaboration with Vanguard Studios. Halo: Spartan Assault is a top-down arcade shooter game which will be exclusive to Windows Phone 8, Windows 8 and Windows RT. The game’s story line is set between Halo 3 and Halo 4 and will focus on the Halo: Spartan Ops team’s first mission against the Covenant forces.
The development and released of this exclusive title was only a matter a time given the different OS’ share core and APIs and is a definitive sign of Microsoft flexing it’s muscle to pushed it’s ecosystem further ahead of the Xbox One launch later this year. Still thinking that MS doesn’t really care about Windows Phone? Well this and the flood of high quality applications hitting the Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 Store in the past months is a clear sign the Redmond is finally “getting it”.
Back to Halo: Spartan Assault. As announced by Microsoft the game will be launched simultaneously on all three platforms (well, actually two because RT and Windows
8 X86 are essentially the same) in July and feature the following goodies:
The game will also support pause and resume on both platforms which means that you can start a campaign on your Windows Phone 8 handset and continue it exactly where you left it on your Windows 8 / RT PC or Tablet. The only downside is that the game will have to be purchased twice; once on Windows 8/RT and once on Windows Phone 8 for $6.99 on each platform. The good news though is that the Windows Phone 8 version only requires 512MB or RAM so all WP8 handsets will be able to run it.
Surprisingly Microsoft never mention Windows RT in any of the official material released today but it has already been confirmed that the game will be fully compatible with your RT tablet but will also obviously not look as nice as the X86 version running on much more powerful hardware. Given Tegra 3′s not so awesome power one can only hope that Microsoft will be able to work out some magic to have it look and run as good as the WP8 version. It has also been noted that XBOX 360 controller support won’t be available at launch but will be enabled in an upcoming update to the game later this summer. Folks, this is just the beginning.
Source: Halo Waypoint
Buyer action
Where to buy or check next
Use this as the final check before ordering a phone, changing network or trusting a headline monthly price.
