There are two extremely promising plot threads running through Halo Wars 2‘s main campaign. The first is that the surprisingly tight-knit (for a real-time strategy game) cast from the first Halo Wars is coming undone. Distance and 38 years of cryogenic sleep have separated the lost crew of the UNSC starship Spirit of Fire from everything they knew at the start of the first game. We watch as Captain James Cutter—the player’s cipher and the commander of the near-derelict warship—is a stranger in an increasingly strange land. It only gets worse as a conflict with an exiled Brute super-warrior called Atriox starts taking away the few ties to human-controlled space he has left.

The second thread is Atriox himself. The cinema quality of the cutscenes from the first Halo Wars makes a return this time around, and those scenes are immediately put to use setting up the alien commander as the most distinct and impressive badass I’ve yet seen in a Halo game. Atriox is a raider with his own army and no friendly ties to Halo‘s perennial bad guys, the religious Covenant that have been trying to execute him for decades.

Here they come and there they go