Buy Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

It's always odd to take one of the greatest tragedies in human history and turn it into a kid-friendly game. Advance Wars has always turned bloody conflict between nations into something entirely pleasant and charming. (The exception is Days of Ruin, which went much deeper into tragedy, arguably to its detriment.) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp had the misfortune of being scheduled to come out just as a real-world war began, and its delay for about a year left one wondering if it would ever come out. Thankfully, it is, and despite real-world drama, Advance Wars 1+2 is a darn charming kid-friendly game about destroying entire armies as effectively as possible.

Advance Wars is basically turn-based strategy on fast-forward. The game takes place on (relatively) small maps where fast-paced aggression is the name of the game. Your overall goal is to advance forward, capture enemy cities, and defeat enemy units until all enemies are defeated or you capture the enemy's main base. Of course, they follow the exact same rules as you do. Battles can drag out, but even long battles are all about constantly pushing and searching for that one weakness that allows you to break through the enemy's defenses.

The core game is incredibly easy to pick up and play. Resource gathering is minimal. You have a set amount of funds that increases with the more cities that you control. Cities can only be captured by certain units (among the weakest), so the flow of the game is about finding ways to get your units into a safe position to take cities while protecting your own. Funds can be spent to purchase more units that allow you to be more aggressive. It's rare that you can win by playing defensively, as raw attrition can burn you down quickly.

There's a wide variety of units to pick from in Advance Wars 1+2, and they all have their uses. The infantry can capture cities but are weak to most other units, and tanks are solid frontline fighters but have no exceptional strengths. Artillery and rocket launchers can attack from a distance but are helpless up close. Choppers and planes have a near-universal advantage in the air but are vulnerable to AA units and have a limited amount of fuel. Generally, stronger units are more expensive to deploy, which means you need to balance the risk of deploying a more powerful tank versus multiple smaller units.

One of the most interesting features of Advance Wars is how you must play around battle damage. Units have 10 HP, and unless you win overwhelmingly, a unit will lose HP even if it wins a fight, although the amount varies. A damaged unit does less damage, and in the case of infantry units, can't capture cities as effectively. Units can be repaired at friendly cities, or two units of the same type can be fused to combine their HP totals. This adds a fun tactical wrinkle where you need to decide if it's worth pulling back a unit to repair it versus pressing your advantage with a weakened unit — or perhaps it's better to have two weaker tanks instead of a strong one. Likewise, you can use this against your enemy. Often, it's better to leave two weakened enemies alive than to kill one enemy and leave the other at full strength.

The other big game-changer in Advance Wars are your commanding officers. COs control the army, and the CO bestows different benefits and weaknesses to the units. In the main storyline, you're usually locked to certain COs, but there are a variety available in created missions and multiplayer. Your choice of CO usually determines how you'll approach combat. Andy, the main character, has default stats for everything. Max, his powerhouse friend, has stronger direct-combat units, but all of his indirect combat units have worse range and lower attack. In comparison, Sami has weaker direct combat units, but her infantry units have better damage and capture cities faster. In general, she excels at movement and leveraging it to make more money to compensate for her general weakness in combat.

Each CO also has a special skill that charges as you fight and can drastically alter the situation. Andy can instantly heal all his units for 2 HP, Olaf can change the weather into snow, effectively crippling any units that don't belong to him for a turn. Drake can summon a tsunami that damages all opposing units, and so on. None of these is an instant win button, but when used at the appropriate time, it can massively swing the pendulum. Two HP from Andy might not sound like a lot, but it's often enough to put damaged units back on top or allow a soldier to finish capturing a city.

Advance Wars is straightforward. The simple and aggressive nature of the game makes it one of the easiest to pick-up-and-play strategy titles on the market. There's no real building phase, and any individual turn is usually quite important. The variety of units and available COs means that you can approach combat in different ways. It ends up being a perfect bite-sized strategy experience, which makes sense since it began as a GBA game. If you're used to more complex strategy games, this might feel a touch basic, but it's a good example of how basic doesn't mean bad.

Of course, there's a lot of game here. The campaigns of Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2 will probably take 30-40 hours on their own, and there are a lot of fun twists and turns that keep the gameplay interesting. Once you're done, you can start taking on maps created by other players or battle other players in the online multiplayer, which gives the title even more value. If the gameplay catches you, then it's a whole lot of bang for your buck.

The one area where Advance Wars 1+2 kind of falters is in story and presentation. The story theoretically involves an all-out war between rival nations, but it's presented more like a Saturday morning cartoon, where the legion of corpses left behind are basically nonexistent, and losing a battle is akin to "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" The game goes all-in on it, so it's fine, but it means the story is forgettable and the COs only stand out because of their colorful designs.

This same sense of unreality applies to the graphics. Pretty much everything is designed to look like an action figure or a cartoony playing piece. Capturing a city involves your bright cartoony soldier jumping up and down on it until the city flattens. It captures the feel of playing with action figures, but I like the new 3D visuals less than the GBA's sprites. They feel a bit too much like a mobile game for my tastes, and I wish the new graphics better captured the feel of the old ones.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a darn fine remake of two the GBA's most addictive games. It doesn't exactly change too much from the original, but it adds some new features, more multiplayer options, and a glossy new coat of paint. That's pretty much all it needs to be. Advance Wars ate hours of my life as a kid, and it certainly has the same potential now that I'm older.

Score: 8.5/10