All right, recruits, fall in. You’re no doubt familiar with Nintendo’s previous strategic combat offerings, Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. What? No, don’t talk to me about Fire Emblem. Son, if you can find me a flying pinto that can beat up one of these tanks, you show it to me. The point is the aforementioned Advance Wars games were good. Don’t try to deny it – they combined bright, cutesy-wootsie graphics with challenging strategic combat, and did it well, recruits.
The point is the brass over at Nintendo have been kind enough to issue us a new format for this man’s army. That’s right – three dimensional real-time strategic combat that allows you, recruits, to control any individual unit under your command. Test what little mental acuity you maggots have against some fast-moving tactical combat operations.
Like I said, you’ll control over a dozen different units, ranging from your average rifle grunt to veterans carrying advanced weapons like heavy machine guns and flamethrowers, to tanks, artillery, fighters, bombers, and gunships.
Each unit has its own unique strategy, strengths, and weaknesses. Light Tanks, for instance, are devastating to lighter machines and infantry, but are chewed apart by heavy tanks and mechanized infantry. Gunships can destroy anything on the ground, but drop like greasy flies when countered by missile infantry or AA guns. Even the lowly grunt, with its long range and plentiful ammo, can be devastating to other infantry in large numbers.
Veteran units get more complicated. Each one, from the Flamethrower to the Assault Infantry, has a special attack performed by holding down the A button. The Assault Infantry unit’s heavy machine gun has a slow rate of fire at first, but it gradually accelerates. Holding the A button – that’s the big green one – in the “sweet spot” ensures a hail of bullets that’ll cut down even light vehicles.
In the thick of battle, it’s nice to have troops you can count on. You can take control of any unit in your battalion simply by targeting it and pressing Z, either in battle or on the thoughtfully-provided map screen. This allows you to pop quickly around the battlefield.
You can issue commands to your units as a whole, by unit type, or individually, depending on what you want to do. You can set units to defend a certain area or to follow you. Units will generally seek and use cover, which is impressive. The downside is that without constant management, your units will most likely get themselves slaughtered. I ask you – what’s the point in setting your units to defend an area if they’ll happily get themselves blown up without firing a shot? First one to answer that gets off KP for the rest of the month.
It’s a clever solution for the problem of applying strategic RTS combat to what is essentially a third person shooter, and it almost works. The downside is that the AI is unable to cope with the demands of warfare. There’s also no way to tell between individual units, so it’s entirely possible to tell one artillery unit to defend one side of the map, then issue the same command to the other, only to have the first artillery roll blithely through the battlefield. The fact is it simply doesn’t work that well, and it can be doubly frustrating in the later maps when timing and quick strategy count for everything.
In truth, it may have been nice to see a way to issue commands to troops on the map screen, to set up simultaneous pincer attacks and the like. As it stands, the game is somewhat less strategic, and more an exercise in keeping ten plates spinning on poles.
Here’s the situation: You’ll take command of a battalion belonging to the armed forces of the Western Front – the green team. We used to be at war with the Tundran Territories led by Russian stereotype and Dolph Lundgren impersonator Marshall Nova. Well, that all changed when the Xylvanian blood-sucker Kaiser Vlad popped on the scene. Now, we’ve banded with the Tundrans to battle through dozens of poorly-acted missions to save the world itself. What we’re about to do redefines the very nature of the phrase “police action.”
The “story,” such as it is, is told in true Advance Wars fashion – through perky, good-natured banter between opposing generals. The dialogue is horrendously cheesy, and the characters aren’t much better – “Brigadier Betty” indeed – but in some weird way, it all fits with the giggly, colourful theme of the game.
While some of you may die, and some may come home horribly maimed, and still more may suffer terrible psychotic episodes, you can at least rest easy in the knowledge that your struggle looked really, really good.
The bright, crisp character models will look wonderful as you grind them underneath your tanks, and you’ll notice almost no slowdown, even with artillery, rockets, and helicopters spewing liquid hell at each other - all the better for you to show ‘em how the Western Frontier conducts business.
Recruits, there’s nothing more thrilling than the sound of a raging battle – the roar of automatic gunfire, the hiss of rockets, the rumble of tanks, and the adorable cries of pain and victory of your units. The soundtrack, while not as awesome as Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries,” sets a nice mood for this soccer match of a war.
The missions you’ll face may strike you as annoying. You’ll break out in paroxysms of rage whenever someone asks you to watch their backpack, I kid you not. The frustrating difficulty of the multitude of “Defend Objective X” missions will make you wish you’d joined the navy instead. Especially since your battalion is just happy to trot around, following whoever’s wearing the chevrons.
But, if you can get past the unnecessarily complex controls and obscene difficulty of said missions, you’ll be rewarded with a rank based on the speed with which you completed your objectives, the damage inflicted on your enemy, and the number of letters you’re gonna have to send home to your troops’ families. These ranks range from S, through A, all the way down to E.
Do well enough, and you’ll unlock some crazy bonus missions that will test your skills as a commander, and my skills in spending money set aside by the Western Front government for “Pointless military maneuvers.”
Dismissed, troops, and try not to disappoint me too badly.
