Music Monday on this very show we revealed the world premiere trailer for the new Halo Wars 2 expansion awakening the nightmare and now it's demo time baby joining me to put the game through its paces our Brian Gerard and Max Schlager Max and Brian thanks guys nice to see you guys it's great to be back right so we we're gonna do live gameplay here right that's what I told because I said I am not having you guys back on this we're gonna do it live we'll do it live yeah all right so let's start it up and tell us what we're gonna look at here Max when I when I lead in here yeah we're gonna be showing our new mode here terminus fire fight it's a wave-based kind of hard mode and Greg Stone is gonna be temaling for us this particular mode is really cool because you've got a base that you can build up like you would in your traditional death match but you've also got these new barricades and turrets and just waves and waves of enemies coming to get you so there you know about firefight right I know it well you know you mentioned gears similar horn mode it's you versus just wave after wave of crazy amounts of enemies it gets harder and harder in the game you better play three people cooperatively yep and I believe it's a dynamic scale and become more difficult as more players join in so Greg's goal here is to try to stay alive our demo at E3 is five levels five levels and Greg's goal is to try to persist and not let them destroy the big fire we saw which is called the terminus. Greg just a few million people watching no big deal buddy so he's added over there right now so now so this is new this is now available well this content the winking in the nightmare expansion comes out this fall this fall so this is really love yeah brand new mode this would be the first time most people are here seeing it but it has been playable in the show here all week at E3 and he can play as a banished yeah absolutely so yeah well while he's getting started I mean addition to this new mode there is a campaign expansion so it's sort of takes place a few months after the events of Halo Wars 2 and the whole campaign plays out from the perspective of atriox and his band his forces and if you saw the trailer on Monday you know they find a ancient foe we haven't seen since Halo 3 and that ancient foe is terrifying it is of course that's why we're gonna see the flight in a little bit right all right as long as Greg lives long enough yeah we will definitely see some flood and let's be clear you cannot miss it so Max what are we taking a look at here so Greg is basically he's building up some different defenses here you saw him earlier he was taking his turrets doing some different upgrades on them he was building down some of the barricades there and you've got a few different kinds some of them like he's got spike traps could place down when you walk over it all yeah pop up people got barrels that you can shoot and explode and you've got like these shield walls basically that just provide a hard barrier for me to get through and the map here one of your main goals is to expand out into different territories we have a special scoring system for this mode that helps make it replayable so it's all about how you control your territories and how well you can basically defeat the incoming enemies right so you see he's getting ready here yeah it's I don't know if you play tower defense games in all area but this is kind of like that you'll notice in the mini map right down there it's it's showing Greg exactly where the enemies are going to be spawning for them and you kind of see their path so like a tower defense game he could go along that path build the barriers that Max described add some turrets and kind of soften them up before they finally reach his base I mean that's the interesting thing about Halo Wars 2 is that there's a lot of common elements from a few different games but each of the different game modes is there's a lot of completely different strategy absolutely right yeah totally you know one thing Greg hasn't done I'm gonna call him out right now of course there he goes yes you know Halo Wars multiplayer is all about your leaders right so we have two new leaders that were showing off at the show here that's gonna be released this month as part of our DLC season pass yep I think fans of you have you know that the arbiter is back he's back the Halo one Halo Wars Arbiter has returned so Greg wants to make sure he's using these leader powers because they're game changers and they're there for a reason so I'm glad to see he's now doing that yeah and this this this particular every time we do a new leader we're trying to do something that changes up the game style changes up the way that you might play so for the arbiter in particular he's got a lot of abilities that center on this rage mechanic and so as you use leader powers they stack up and they make your units stronger right and it lets you use them more often so it's really all about just kind of bringing in more constantly and so hopefully Greg will have an opportunity to show that off on some of the bigger waves that come in here we saw some of the we saw a lot of the defenses but can you really outline one line by line some of the new defenses we can expect yeah so basically as you so you start out you've got a main base effectively which you could still build your turret spots on an upgrade once you go a little further out you've got you could see these little wall segments here where you could basically build barricades yeah the barricades are different from you want to see versus Spanish so different advantages you know summer tougher summer a little bit they provide more mobility for your troops you know like I said here he's got kind of the three different templates some that are more effective against incoming melee units some that are just straight up shield walls by the way I love the fact he's waiting for the next wave here and he's like chatting with the player here we go now we're gonna see how well some of these defenses work against the flood who starts walking in and then as you expand out and build those bases and you also get more turrets lots and so you get different kinds of turrets you can upgrade and all right there we go yeah we can see what's going on now yeah so this is our first flood wave starting to move in by this time I mean Greg's got a pretty nice size for us so I think he's in I think he's in pretty good shape also I should just mention for folks that may not know this game obviously looks awesome on Xbox 1s and HDR update was released with our last patch last month yes it was also runs on wind 10 at 4k resolution looks stunning so and it's also supports window you know Xbox play anywhere yep by once played on both bottom your progress and the campaign goes back and forth and it's delightful so now things are heating up a little bit yeah I think Rick's doing yeah I was starting to bring those leader powers so you can imagine in a three-player game legendary difficulty much more challenging but pretty interesting the three bus could pick different leaders and kind of synergize and use our leader powers and cool ways to really give us the advantage he's really he's really digging in there how close so the wave is kind of coming to an end here we can see the enemies coming in yeah you see at the upper right there he's right now in wave 4 this demo will go to what will those five waves he's infected 47 out of 111 so right now we just got that notification wave 5's about to start which features yeah the abomination max what's the story that guy by the way yeah yeah so one of the cool things about the waves too is we're gonna have these face-based boss waves mini boss waves where you get some really big heavy units coming in to attack you and in this particular wave we've got a flood commander that's gonna come in and he's a really strong melee threat and surrounded by a bunch of his minions there and so to come in and you'll see that's gonna put a lot more strain on Greg's defenses and his forces so he's got to really make sure his base and his powers are ready to go it's kind of dig in he's getting ready for it should be they should be coming in a minute here any minute no we're waiting for the big reveal don't fail me now Greg and just shooting in you're watching a little bit of Halo Wars this is the brand new down the little cocktail that's coming later this year right right yep it'll be out in the fall area it's a full campaign expansion when this is our new multiplayer mode called terminus fireflies and there's big man now we're gonna find out what Greg's made of I'm having a flashbacks of 10 plus years ago yeah you know it's been almost 10 years since we've seen the flood look at that boss in the middle that's the abomination take them bow take them to add Greg so one of the things he tries to do is hold these units across these different defenses yeah he's trying to lead him on a little bit right yeah God those those the way those floods warm it's unbelievable yeah you know they're they're not that powerful in their own right but once enough of them get on top of you they'll in typical flood fashion absolutely all right he's going after the boss now yep he's gonna try and get around and the bosses are always gonna go after your nexus that's the home the home part of your base you really got to defend so that's where he's moving towards yep it's coming down here to the final Greg's already got 224,000 that's actually that's pretty good yeah I mean that's one of the cool things too much mode is there's a lot of different factors that play into how you score in the mode so you can choose your difficulty that's kind of a multiplier you've also got bases and as you expand out that increases your multiplier if you lose them it goes back down how quickly you defeat the waves and you know how many enemies you can destroy at any given time all that factors into how you score I don't think this guy's even gonna get near inspire he's just just kind of hiding him around like a guy here I feel like he's making this look easy I mean that is the caveat we did make this extra a little extra easy demo for the show here but at home it's gonna be certainly more challenging congratulations Greg and I think I think it's about it Greg's gonna do it early he's playing easy mode nice nice work yeah all right earlier this week Kiki Wolfhill brought us a halo plasma rifle with a that a bunch you guys over three or three signs and today we're gonna give it away to a fan in the audience Brian right you've been involved that they have a lot of time why don't you pick a lucky audience wow pressure wow look at this let me see it's really hard pressure I'm gonna go I'm gonna go for the guy in the ODS T shirt there you go I'll let you come on down I don't know how to say we'll respond to this but you're on there buddy nice to see you man there you go this is yours all right well it's a hold on no move oh god boy all right thank you to Max Brian Greg and what's your name Dustin the awakening the nightmare launches this fall and now it's time hey guys thanks for watching if you like this video please consider giving it a thumbs up subscribing and sharing it around you are the reason I get to keep doing this so thank you profusely thank you