I've seen some very good strategy games at this show (still haven't seen StarCraft II, however, got an app. in half an hour), but Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios, coming exclusively to the Xbox 360 in 2008, has got to be the most beautiful one yet.

Not only have the guys at Ensemble managed to portray the Halo universe with extreme authenticity, but they've actually taken it a notch beyond the FPS games, with a beautiful depiction of the Marine base, and just these epic scenes of battles with the Covenant.

The action in Halo Wars takes place some 20 years before the start of the original Halo. Obviously, the story is very important to the team and, although all I got was a wry smile and a response of "we're only showing the UNSC campaign" answer from the dev, it's quite clear that at some later date, a playable Covenant campaign will be revealed.

Okay, you have to realize (and this is something that Ensemble devs stressed several times) Halo Wars was built from the ground up to be a console title. The game has been two and a half years in development already and out of that time, six months invested into optimizing the controls. So, as you can imagine, the control scheme is very important to the team, and it's a matter of double tapping the A button and then sending your troops with the X button, while a large circular context menu is used to build and research just about anything in the game. Resource management definitely takes a back seat in this one and it's all streamlined. The focus is entirely on the action. Of course, for those of you who are into having more control over your troops, grouping will be an option as well as many other common advanced RTS commands.

But the bottom line is that this game looks amazing. It's like zooming out of the first-person shooter and being presented with a more epic scene from the Halo universe. As the Marine dropships were flying over a canyon I couldn't help but admire the incredible detail in the scenery (for an RTS), as well as the quality of the shadows and individual models for each of the units shown.

For the demo, the developers prepared an initial conflict between a couple of Warthogs and some Covenant ground troops, and then moved on to the truly impressive stuff with loads of infantry, Ghosts, Banshees and Scorpions cluttering the screen. And even though the combat looked extremely impressive, the frame-rate stayed solid throughout.

The action sequence ended with the introduction of a huge Covenant walker unit, The Scarab. As the Scarab used its powerful and massive green beam to tear through literally everything on the battlefield, an orbital strike was called in from the Spirit of the Fire, and lo and behold, the massive walker was brought to its mechanical knees with several powerful strikes. It's as if the Halo universe came alive on a whole new scale, really impressive.

Not a lot more was revealed about the game at this point, and I know that many of you (including myself) are frustrated that there will be no PC version. One of the game journalists in the room insisted on asking when the PC version will come out, but Ensemble remained adamant in their claim that they sort of wiped the slate clean and started from scratch in building a true and true 360 RTS.

Hey, at least it will be great to play it on the 360.