Advance Wars

While the bright presentation and expressive characters might convince you that it's built for kids, Advance Wars is a disarmingly punishing turn-based tactics game with a very strong, if simple mechanical foundation. I am by no means whatsoever an expert of any kind at strategy games (they're like the last frontier of gaming that I don't understand yet), but even to my amateurish eyes there are a few avoidable missteps that I noticed that took me out of the experience at times.

The core gameplay of Advance Wars (and presumably the previous Wars titles) revolves around moving your units around a plausibly realistic area of terrain to defeat an enemy militia by either wiping out every unit or capturing their home base. The maps tend to have rivers, mountains, roads, and bridges that create chokepoints, directional lanes of attack, and generally draw your attention or encourage a particular playstyle. The armies are made up of the mobile but weak foot soldiers who can capture bases, and various vehicular units in the ground, sea, and sky. There are a lot of different types, usually one for every matchup you can imagine - bomber planes that can attack ground units but not other flying ones, long-range artillery units that can attack without returning fire but can't move and shoot the same turn, transport-only units to quickly move infantry, battleships for aerial units to dock and refuel, and so on. There's a lot to keep track of but nothing stands out as massively complicated, and in general it feels like the distillation of an imaginary war-by-paper. No units are especially creative or unique, it's all based on real-world war imagery and pretty much as standard as you could imagine such a title.

The units' interactions are compounded by the CO system, wherein the commanding officer that you pick for your mission will alter their squad's abilities and stats, increasing range or mobility or firepower at the expense of another. Additionally, each CO has a special power they can activate after a certain amount of in-match progress that they can use to increase their advantages even further and make a decisive strike. The catch here is that you will always being facing an opposing CO as well, so being wary of the enemy's strengths is just as important as maximizing your own. If you aren't careful you can have your entire squad taken behind the shed in just a couple of unfortunate turns.

In my mind, the weakest part of Advance Wars' combat design is the indecision surrounding the factories. Some of the maps have factory tiles that, when captured, can produce units with the funds you accumulate as you capture more neutral cities and outposts, something that I think helps the player make more crucial or daring tactical maneuvers: if you are able to create more units, the present units become more disposable, and you're able to sacrifice them to pull off daring backdoor rushes for the opposing base or safely complete a retreat. Additionally, it adds a layer of managerial depth to each turn, as you can assess what units would be most helpful to your existing troops and allocate resources accordingly. All that is great, but a large amount of the maps don't have these factories at all, which is awkward. Not only do you endlessly accumulate funds that you can't use, but the value of capturing cities is dropped significantly without their money generating function, and in turn that weakens the utility of the foot soldier units who are the only ones capable of capturing a city to begin with. It really feels like at one point the game would revolve around these factories, but they couldn't commit to them in every map as it raised the complexity too much for a game that's trying to be a bit simpler to pick up. As it stands, this whole implementation can occasionally feel awkward, but it's more of a steady annoyance than a game-breaking oversight.

Interestingly, the game doesn't allow you to actually dig into the meat of the content - the Campaign and War Room modes - until you complete a very rigorous and well-considered Training mode, consisting of 14 tutorials to teach you about the basics of the combat and how different units interact. The complexity of the challenges is raised throughout the missions as less guidance is given, perfectly easing the player into the early missions in the campaign mode. While locking off the content is a controversial decision, I think it was for the better, as there are a shit-ton of unit types in this game, and learning them in the actual campaign missions themselves may have been a bit overbearing.

The campaign is a cheeky romp through various countries where your group of COs are ordered to chase down the Blue Star commander Olaf and put a stop to him. Across your travels you'll pick fights with just about every nation on earth, all of whom marvel at each others' power like some kind of shounen. It's a bit weird, and it begs some questions that probably aren't meant to be asked, like who's calling the shots on this mission? Why aren't precautions being taken to avoid unnecessary conflict? Why do the resources and unit support fluctuate so wildly for your team, who appear to be the squadron taking on the most pressing and important mission for your country at all times? Most of the storyline is just an excuse to run into certain COs of varying skillsets and temperaments and blast them all to smithereens, and the relationships between the COs are cliched. It's quaint, and it has its charms with the colorful presentation, but it's a bit lacking overall. Fundamentally, it just never produces a compelling reason to keep playing the game beyond just wanting a tactics game to play.

You have three COs under your command for a majority of the campaign, but they were certainly not created equal. Some of the characters are just completely outmatched in certain levels, but the general strategy reveals itself simply by looking at the terrain, which you can't see until you start the mission. Not being able to see a layout of the terrain before selecting your CO is really frustrating and feels like guesswork at times. Most of the missions are designed with a single CO in mind, but I really struggled to find a good use for Sami, as Andy's defensive bonuses and Max's ridiculous firepower gave me everything I needed for the entire campaign.

After you're done with the campaign, the War Room mode gives the game some additional longevity. This is something of a challenge course where the player has to face some difficult odds on a carefully crafted scenario in given terrain and against a given CO. You're given a choice of CO, including some of the enemies from the campaign if you've managed to unlock them. It's a fun diversion and a lot of them are really tough, but they do definitely sharpen your brain and let you focus a little bit more on the easier stuff elsewhere in the game. Finally, there's a pretty cool one-console multiplayer mode where you can pass the gameboy to a friend and play against one another. This is really fun but unfortunately, unless both of you are quite good at the game, the AI COs probably act more optimally and are tougher as a result.

In all, Advance Wars is a charming and entertaining pure tactics game that was still trying to find its footing. The game's polish and quality varies a lot, with a strange and ultimately inconsequential storyline in the campaign mode, a very thorough and detailed tutorial, and fun basic unit combat held back slightly by the awkward resources system. I do think in general this is certainly worth a play, if you fancy yourself smart enough to figure out how to outthink some of the more punishing levels and scenarios. The CO powers bring some interesting dynamics to the experience and for a handheld title this is among the decent non-RPG offerings in the genre. Worth a try, with some conditions.