Soundtrack Review: Halo Wars (2009)
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This is a soundtrack review of the video game score Halo Wars by Stephen Rippy.
“Leads the early running for crushing disappointment of the year”
By now the Halo trilogy has taken its place amongst the pantheon of universally praised video game scores, drawing wide praise from score and video game review sites as well as numerous gamer friends of mine. Martin O’Donnell and Michael Salvatori’s works are amongst the best the genre has to offer, perhaps not on the level of the Medal of Honor series but certainly bringing an epic and cool sound like few other things you’ll hear. Minor disappointment arose when I discovered Halo Wars was not produced by Bungie and thus would not feature the services of either composer, but Stephen Rippy pledged to remain somewhat loyal to the sound, and I feared not…at the time. Then I actually went and heard the score.
Disappointing
Suffice to say, Halo Wars leads the early running for crushing disappointment of the year and features few of the appeals of any of its predecessors. Certainly good scores in sagas have survived without loyalty to original themes (Star Trek 2 as the best), but the new themes should maintain a comparable quality. In contrast, the “Spirit of Fire” main theme is fairly unremarkable, and since it’s the only new theme in the score it feels even worse (mono-thematic scores can succeed if the theme is as strong as, say, Eragon’s…this is obviously not). Only in the all-too-short “Freaked Out” does it come close to the soaring quality we’ve come to expect, while the rest of the approaches are either unnoticeable to my ears or still maddeningly underdeveloped.. Sure, the trilogy’s main theme pops up, including a fine choral variation in the first track, but it feels somewhat like token mention. More interesting are the middle-eastern-sounding takes on that theme, but these are poorly developed.
Some cues have the cool orchestral, electronic, and choral fusion down like O’Donnell did, as with “Bad Here Day”, “Just Ad Nauseam”, “Status Quo Show”, “De Facto De Matter”, and “Part of the Problem”, the latter coming the closest to the successfully fusing of guitar and orchestra for “Mombasa Suite” and “Delta Halo Suite” for Halo 2. But their energy and density are a few notches below their predecessors. Nothing feels as action-packed as “Unyielding” or “Earth City” (the rising four-note action chords only appear in “Through Your Hoops”, and without great fanfare) or as awe-inspiring as “Finish the Fight” (that “Insignificanta” is the most majestic speaks volumes). The choral work feels more like a backdrop than a strong presence, lacking the depth that helped the original’s work truly soar. Compounding problem here is that the vast majority of the cues consist of minimalist electronic takes, mostly bass and guitar. As a few cues this could perhaps be passable underscore, but when multiple cues run together (tracks 3-5 as one example), the approach becomes banal and disengaging. It’s like the majority of the material was based around the second half of “Cairo Suite” from Halo 2, which is not high praise.
Conclusion
Other faults abound. We were promised an orchestral sound and a rich texture that would alter for each world, yet the former is infrequently dominant and the latter is completely absent, replaced by a pervasive sense of sameness…not repetitive sameness, but stylistic repetition that doesn’t differentiate into standout moments. Most importantly, we were promised a score that could sit comfortably within the Halo universe, and instead of the fine continuation to the series I found an album that felt too long (nothing captures you) yet also felt like it ended too quickly (no development). Such non-intrusive material may suffice as an unassuming background listen, but is that really how far the saga should fall without Bungie on board? Regardless of the criticism from me and other, do not expect this to persuade the most dogmatic fanboys. Only 5 star reviews litter the ITunes store with such mind-numbing assertions like “Stephen Rippy is one of the only other artists who could have pulled this off” (seriously, have they heard other composers?), “This OST is truly unique” (clearly choir has never been used in a video game), “this album is just as good IF NOT BETTER than the other Halo music” (Where?), and “Martin O’Donnell would be proud.” While I suppose such attention to the world of scores is nice (a nice contrast from half the reviews for the Golden Compass), this is not the place to look. The upcoming score for Halo 3:ODST cannot arrive fast enough.
Album Situation: Single disc release for download-only versions. The cd release also comes with a DVD featuring 9 more tracks. Quite the Vacation Resort and We’re Burning Sunshine are probably the two best tracks for this score period, but they can’t elevate the rest of the material. Both releases sit at the same level of quality, but if you really want the score, the extra tracks should be worth the price.
Best album: CD/DVD release
Original Album (53:46)
1. Spirit of Fire (2:12)
2. Bad Here Day (3:01)
3. Perspective (1:24)
4. Money Or Meteors (3:23)
5. Flollo (3:01)
6. Just Ad Nauseum (0:57)
7. Unusually Quiet (1:29)
8. Flip And Sizzle (3:39)
9. Put The Lady Down (2:21)
10. Six-Armed Robbing Suit (2:55)
11. Action Figure Hands (3:00)
12. Status Quo Show (1:13)
13. Part Of The Plan (0:30)
14. Work Burns And Runaway Grunts (3:07)
15. Freaked Out (0:44)
16. Rescued Or Not (1:31)
17. Best Guess At Best (2:56)
18. One Problem At A Time (1:14)
19. De Facto The Matter (1:31)
20. Part Of The Problem (2:58)
21. Fingerprints Are Broken (3:22)
22. Out Of There Alive (1:04)
23. Through Your Hoops (1:36)
24. Under Your Hurdles (1:28)
25. Insignificantia (All Sloppy / No Joe) (3:20)
DVD Tracks (16:26)
01. X-06 1:36
02. Fingerprints Are Broken (Harvest Intro) 1:05
03. Five Long Years 3:52
04. Money Or Meteors (Arcadia Intro) 1:10
05. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Changed 1:26
06. Best Guess At Best (Shield Ext. Intro) 1:12
07. Quite The Vacation Resort 2:09
08. Bad Here Day (Shiled Int. Intro) 1:10
09. We’re Burning Sunshine 2:46
Listen to Halo Wars by Stephen Rippy below:
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Comments
I agree with you Jon. This was a bitter disappointment. What disappointed me the most wasn’t the themes or the orchestration, but the sounds. It sounded like we were back in the 90s, almost midi quality at times. Such a shame. I really enjoyed Halo 1 and 2 by Salvatori and O’Donnell.
Jon Blough Reply:
March 1st, 2009 at 6:36 pm
“The choral work feels more like a backdrop than a strong presence, with the lacking depth that helped the original’s work truly soar” should be
“The choral work feels more like a backdrop than a strong presence, lacking the depth that helped the original’s work truly soar”. Oopsies. Thanks
J.D. Reply:
March 3rd, 2009 at 4:42 pm
Allow me, as a musician and occasional composer myself, to disagree:
I can count more new themes than you did.
For main themes, there are:
1. Spirit of Fire theme (ship’s theme)
2. Covenant theme (brass and choir in a four-note descending pattern, most commonly heard theme on disc next to “Spirit of Fire”)
3. Second Covenant theme (string ostinati patterns backing choral and brass, only really gets shown off in “Rescued or Not” albeit hints can be heard in numerous cutscene tracks)
4. UNSC theme (appears first in “Quite A Vacation Resort”, “One Problem at a Time” and “We’re Burning Sunshine” in various settings)
5. War theme (Choral theme, first appears in “Five Long Years” and is re-stated in “Out of there Alive)
There, I have found five themes. I assume you must have gotten the iTunes release, which mainly features the ambient, ingame world tracks. However, the CD version features 9 bonus tracks on a DVD (along with some other bonus materials) which may or may not change your opinion:
An example:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LxXrkS2dU_Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u83pE6OYuOE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XoVM-xM6408
(The first of the three links fixes your complaint of no four-note action chord, as it accompanies the classic choral theme on piano)
Soundwise, Halo Wars has a different sound by necessity as it is an RTS. RTS games do not rely off of cinematic, linear music; unlike shooters, which have room for movie-style thematic development, RTS generally go more ambient so as to avoid annoying the player in-game with overly repetitious, noisy orchestral scoring (that’s just saved for when a battle or something special starts). Furthermore, the game takes place before the discovery of Halo; as such, the Forerunner music (the choir you complain about) is shoved in the background since this is about the war that leads up to it (note the emphasis, for example, on more traditional military-style percussion over the tribal drumming of Halo 1, 2 and 3). While the Forerunner material does appear on occasion, that’s just to link the games together, as some Forerunner artifacts appear in the game as part of the story (but once again, they aren’t the focus, hence the smaller role given to them).
Most of all, the game takes place before Halo 1, making it a prequel. This means the majority of O’Donnell’s themes have no place in-game, as the places and characters have yet to take their place in the story, relegating their thematic statements mainly as foreshadowing. Furthermore, as the games’ focus is on the more traditional, military aspects of the Halo universe, the style begins to change too. As far as it sounding “MIDI-ish”, that’s probably a result of mixing, as Rippy himself stated that he used no orchestral samples and recorded the whole thing live in Prague.
And last but not least, Marty O’Donnell gave his thumbs up to Rippy’s material. When the creator of the musical language has no trouble with someone else’s take on his work, I’ll accept it as part of that universe.
If you want a more orchestral score, however, you could try Stephen Rippy and Kevin McMullans’ collaboration on the magnificent “Age of Empires III” score:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y2pU-t9IWP4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5joA9cjRKO4&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HAKSqOojoPc
A humble opinion,
Jon Blough Reply:
March 3rd, 2009 at 9:12 pm
Now THIS is an intelligent discussion…a nice contrast from the comments on, say, Quantum of Solace
With a really focused listen and your descriptions, I can pick out these themes/hints of themes, but they lack a strongly defined presence. For the general listener this will be a problem since few of these ideas (which I feel are merely serviceable) grab you. For the more devoted soundtrack collector it’s also problematic in terms of placing it within the genre. I have no problem with deviating from previously established themes (X-Men 3, Potter 4 as good examples), but the new work has to equal its predecessor for me to put it on the same level. Thus I wouldn’t complain about the missing grandeur of the Forerunner music or the lack of loyalty to Marty’s themes if they replaced with equally grand material or motifs/themes/structures that were different but of a similarly engaging quality. I didn’t get that from this album.
When doing this review I’d heard all but the last three tracks on the DVD, so I suppose I can thank you for this The earlier ones are nothing special, but “We’re Burning Sunshine” had a good action take on the trilogy’s main theme and “Quite the Vacation Resort” rose to the occasion. However, it feels like too little to late for me, as much of the surrounding material just failed to do it for me.
I realize it’s an RTS and that may demand a more unassuming score in some parts, but there’s a fine line between unassuming and disengaging. We get little sense of world differentiation or heroism throughout any of this, and no real taste of quality in-game battle music. I think both our worldviews could be met, with my demands for a more engaging listen fusing with your point about avoiding distracting gamers. But I also question why an RTS score can’t excite you, why it has to be stuck at this level of quality when the material (space alien battles? one of the most inspiring ideas ever) begs for more. Note that I’m also grading the album…the score may not be intrusive in-game (not that I’ll ever know), but as a stand-alone listen it disappoints.
I’m sure they wouldn’t have hired Rippy if O’Donnell didn’t approve, but while a thumbs up is a nice gift, the music is what I’m looking at. I suppose we can think of this as the “Star Trek 7″ of the saga.
J.D. Reply:
March 4th, 2009 at 12:47 am
Thanks for the response. It’s nice that a discussion can come from this. Now, here’s my own opinion:
I should probably have talked about this in my last post, but when I first listened to Halo Wars, I was initially disappointed. Not quite as crushed as you were, but more underwhelmed. On subsequent listens, I noticed that the problem (in my case, at least) was the arrangement of the album: the ambient tracks were put in these clumps which dampened all the big thematic moments I enjoyed. I ended up using my recording set up to rip the bonus tracks off the DVD, and after some rearrangement and inserting the extra material, I found the listening experience vastly improved. The new tracks helped balance out the filler quite nicely, and I’ve since grown to accept the score next to it’s venerable Halo brethren.
While I know you didn’t enjoy most of Rippy’s new themes, I think part of the fault lies in Sumthing Else Records’ presentation of the score (as shown by the poor arrangement I complained about above). Also, the album release is lacking a large chunk of live material (Rippy recorded 65 minutes worth of orchestral and choral music in Prague, and 10 minutes of electronic/additional underscore in Dallas). Seeing that the album is only 53 minutes long, and a good deal of it is the electronic underscore, I suspect whoever arranged the album is at fault for putting the synths as the meat of the meal instead of the decoration. Having actually seen the game, I can say I think the themes develop and function much better in context than in it’s current stand alone release. In this case, I feel it is not so much the fault of the material, but rather it’s presentation out of game (I personally think it’s vastly superior to McCarthy’s work on Star Trek, but I digress). As an example for context, see the below video (a cutscene from the game, so you can see how Rippy’s score functions):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Jf6AUxqXeQ
And lastly, it isn’t much a question of “Hiring” Rippy: Stephen Rippy was the in-house composer at Ensemble Studios since it’s founding in the 90s. He was invited by his brother David, who was one of the founders of the original company. He’s been scoring games for them for 12 years, so I doubt they would have contacted anyone else for the job (similar story with Marty O’Donnell, actually; he’s the in house composer for Bungie, so he wouldn’t have been available to break his contract to score someone else’s game).
Oh, and I still urge you to seek out Rippy’s work on Age of Empire 3. Even if you got a bad impression from Halo Wars, his stuff in AOE3 is superb, all-out orchestral stuff without a synth in sight. For some random samples on the web, see below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmvHljMLIlw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jicV8EWaxk&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brR6-TGTbzE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmyjgs-y1k&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJa9DYgq8V8&feature=related
AOE3 remains one of my favorite scores of ‘05, thanks to it’s intelligent merging of ethnic instruments (dulcimers, mandolins, bagpipes and even banjos!) with live orchestra. Of course, that’s just what I think…
Thanks a lot for the great discussion,
J.D. Reply:
March 4th, 2009 at 1:33 am
I forgot to address the rather interesting question you raised about RTS games and their music; I myself am not sure of the proper answer, as I have seen/heard effective results in both the ambient world and the magnificent, powerful orchestral material most people enjoy. Strangely, Rippy has experimented with both fields in the “Age of” series he’s done for Ensemble (the makers of Halo Wars”) with success on both fronts. Look at “Age of Mythology”, for example: he recorded some material live with orchestra, but due to budget constraints he wrote the score relying largely on ethnic instruments, percussion and ambiance. While the resulting score isn’t great on CD, it’s extremely effective in game. Compare this to his score to Age of Empires III: unlike AOM’s reliance on quietly evoking moods or atmosphere, AOE3, with it’s large budget was able to afford a massive orchestral effort spiced with all sorts of ethnic instruments. As a gamer, I have found both to be equally good in game, albeit AOE3 is the vastly better listening experience when put to CD due to it’s memorability in themes and orchestration.
In comparison, I think Halo Wars is somewhat of an attempt at synthesis of both the organic material that brought Rippy critical acclaim for AOE3 and his lesser known, early ambient scores. For me, as I explained in my previous comment, I feel the score is poorly arranged on disc and some of the game’s best orchestral material is left out in favor of the electronic grooves, which despite their effectiveness in game, do indeed slow down the experience apart from context. I think that perhaps if the album were given a rerelease (or even if fans were willing to do the splicing and reworking that I’ve been doing with the tracks for the past few days), the scores true effectiveness would come and reveal itself to the non-gamer listeners. Or maybe I’m just thinking too hard about this in my spare time. 
I should’ve put the DVD tracklisting in here. Jorn, if you please, can you throw this part after the geek score?
Album Situation: Single disc release for download-only versions. The cd release also comes with a DVD featuring 9 more tracks. Quite the Vacation Resort and We’re Burning Sunshine are probably the two best tracks for this score period, but they can’t elevate the rest of the material. Both releases sit at the same level of quality, but if you really want the score, the extra tracks should be worth the price.
Best album: CD/DVD release
Also, please include this at the end of the review. THANKS!
DVD Tracks (16:26)
01. X-06 1:36
02. Fingerprints Are Broken (Harvest Intro) 1:05
03. Five Long Years 3:52
04. Money Or Meteors (Arcadia Intro) 1:10
05. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Changed 1:26
06. Best Guess At Best (Shield Ext. Intro) 1:12
07. Quite The Vacation Resort 2:09
08. Bad Here Day (Shiled Int. Intro) 1:10
09. We’re Burning Sunshine 2:46
Jorn Tillnes Reply:
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Fixed!
Jon Blough Reply:
March 3rd, 2009 at 10:55 pm
almost…
Please include this part at the end (after the original CD listing) of the review…I probably should’ve made this clearer. THANKS!
DVD Tracks (16:26)
01. X-06 1:36
02. Fingerprints Are Broken (Harvest Intro) 1:05
03. Five Long Years 3:52
04. Money Or Meteors (Arcadia Intro) 1:10
05. Nothing Ventured, Nothing Changed 1:26
06. Best Guess At Best (Shield Ext. Intro) 1:12
07. Quite The Vacation Resort 2:09
08. Bad Here Day (Shield Int. Intro) 1:10
09. We’re Burning Sunshine 2:46
Soundtrack Seek
A disappointing soundtrack to a disappointing game.
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