Advance Wars’ slick reboot makes 20 years of trouble melt away

Before the Fire Emblem games claimed the crown as Nintendo’s premier turn-based strategy game, there was Advance Wars. First released at a critical moment – on September 10, 2001 – advance war The series was a continuation of what was born on Nintendo’s Famicom, but it seemed perfectly at home on the then-new Game Boy Advance. Long, turn-based battles were ideal for the pick up, play and pause nature of the GBA.

But Advance Wars fans haven’t seen a new entry in the series since 2008. Advance Warfare: Days of DoomA Nintendo DS game that took the series’ cute, colorful combat in a much darker direction.

Thanks to Shantae and the River City Girls developer WayForward, a new generation of Nintendo fans have the chance to experience Advance Wars in a sleek, reimagined collection known (somewhat clumsily) as Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp, The Switch duo brings back Advance Wars’ charming, cartoony roots, and delivers the slickest versions of the first two GBA games yet.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp Like the more popular Fire Emblem games, the game is composed of turn-based battles on grid-based maps, in which players build and command military units on land, sea, and in the air. Players strategically move infantry, tanks, planes, submarines and warships to take control of cities and factories as part of an international conflict. Missions often play out like chess matches, where players (and their enemy) have a set number of units and a shared goal: annihilate the opposing army, capture their main headquarters, or achieve another map-specific victory. fulfill the condition. Battles in Advance Wars are slow and methodical – but thanks to the many variables to consider such as terrain, the fog of war and the special abilities of Commanding Officers (COs), they are rarely dull or predictable.

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Image: WayForward/Nintendo

Unlike some strategy games, there is no frantic resource gathering – cities give players money to spend on new units every day, and factories and airports, when present on the map, offer reinforcements. Instead players need to be more mindful of striking distance, range of movement, terrain advantages, and the strengths and weaknesses of individual units. For example, a tank is highly vulnerable to bomber aircraft, but those aircraft are vulnerable to anti-air units. Infantry can easily advance through forests and mountains, and capture structures, but they are no match for tanks or helicopters. Short-range units need to get out of the firing range of artillery and rocket launchers. Submarines may be powerful stealth units, but their ability to dive underwater and out of sight means they eat up fuel. As you progress through the battles of Advance Wars, its strategic depth becomes apparent.

Taking the intricacies of the game further are COs: cartoonish, archetypal characters who have passive strengths and weaknesses, and can unleash special abilities once they are charged up. re-boot camp introduces each CO at a comfortable pace, starting with Andy and Max, an inexperienced young CO who can magically repair units, and a brawny, confident veteran who can respectively give his units an attack boost Is. Enemy COs – who can be played in later missions and in the game’s Versus mode – have even more powerful abilities, such as Olaf’s Blizzard, a blizzard that freezes movement, or Eagle’s Lightning Strike, Which basically gives him two turns in one. Some abilities may feel overpowered or unbalanced, but Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp Not particularly difficult; You can often limp your way to victory. There are two difficulty modes: the easy Casual setting and the more challenging Classic setting, in case you find your enemies to be pushovers. The game’s questionable AI certainly makes its share of lunkhead mistakes, just as it did in the early 2000s.

Image: WayForward/Nintendo

WayForward and Nintendo have dramatically improved the look of the first two Advance Wars games, making the battlefield more akin to a tabletop war game, where action figures and brightly colored toys engage in blood-soaked battles. However, there’s a disconnect between the cel-shaded, pleasantly cartoonish COs and the plastic toys they fight with. The animations that accompany the COs highlighting their special powers, while well animated, slow down the fight to an annoying degree. But it’s hard to fault the overall polish and presentation here; It’s a very elegant update of two 20-year-old games, and the charming personalities of the game’s commanders have only improved.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp Expensive package. It includes two full story campaigns spanning dozens of missions (though only the first advance war campaign unlocked from the start), online multiplayer battles against friends, local multiplayer and a war room where players can play and replay individual scenarios. There’s also a custom map designer with a dead-simple set of tools for creating and sharing homemade battlefields. For newcomers, it’s a massive amount of content; For returning Advance Wars fans, this is an extremely sophisticated way to replay dozens of familiar scenarios. played hundreds of hours advance war And Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising on long journeys two decades ago, re-boot camp It felt like watching a classic remastered movie again—I knew all the moves, all the beats, but it was a relaxing replay nonetheless.

The new Advance Wars, just like the original, comes at an odd time. Nintendo recognized this last year when, following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it was delayed Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp sine die. But toylike soldiers rendering cities in an exaggerated way and cartoon characters being obliterated by artillery fire detract from the real world war that Nintendo pauses in 2022. An urban military combat game right now. If anything, the return of Advance Wars feels like a throwback to a simpler time, made better with age and reverence for the long-neglected, still-great franchise.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-boot Camp will happen Released on 21 April nintendo switch, The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code provided by Nintendo. Vox Media is an affiliated partnership. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Play Gamez’s ethics policy here,