Let's see what we can glean from this allegedly leaked Halo Wars 2 art

Break out your thinking caps, Spartans. Twitter user and self-described "XBLA watchdog" lifelower tweeted some supposed Halo Wars 2 art late last evening, and if it is indeed legit, there may be some things about the upcoming Xbox One and PC RTS that we can suss out from the image's details. First, let's take a closer look: 

Okay, I'm just gonna start up at the top and work my way down. The first thing to notice is that this is the Ark, the site of the final battle in Halo 3. It's a bit hard to tell, but the installation looks intact, so I'd wager this takes place before that game.

That doesn't mean we won't see familiar locations, though. Scoot your eyes downward a bit and you'll see a large pillar-like structure. Again, it's difficult to be sure, but it looks awful similar to the towers from the Halo 3 mission "The Covenant" to me. Then again, all Forerunner structures have a somewhat similar design.

The biggest eye-catchers are definitely those twin Scarabs, and their chunkier armor plus red paint - and the fact that the Halo Wars 2 teaser focused on a snarling Brute - makes me think these are a Brute variant on the powerful walking tanks.

I'm not so sure what the vehicle on the left with smoking rockets coming out of it is - perhaps something entirely new? The vehicles on the right with the yellow energy blasts looks like Locusts, small counterparts to the big, bad Scarabs first introduced in the original Halo Wars.

And lastly, in the foreground, we see a mixture of Spartans and marines charging forward. No surprises there - we humans tend not to agree with merciless aliens that squish us with glowing red energy maces. The sheer number of Spartans would again indicate this is before Halo 3, during the Human-Covenant War.

We expect to see more of Halo Wars 2 at E3 2016, so perhaps Microsoft will be able to shed some light on this art and tell us what we're really seeing.