I was kind of into Black Hole Rise. mission? reclamation. Day 9 I thought, I made a mistake that cost the whole fight. Great, I knew it then. I knew I was too eager to get promoted. Heading to the front, I left a newly occupied airfield undefended. Yeah, busy playing to my advantage and all that – or so I thought – but that got the enemies I’ve seen but not worried about starting to take back the airfield. At the time, I had a really bad feeling and hoped I could still turn things around. But on a deeper level, somehow, I also knew that I had just screwed up the whole thing. I’d lose the airport, and before I could get it back, they’d destroy the perimeter of the other units around it – crap units, sure, but a waste of time on a map where pacing is everything. Somehow, I knew I screwed up, which is the hallmark of a good tactical game. Still, what’s the hallmark of a great tactical game? I had fun even as I continued to play, working my way toward failure that I could already see clearly.
I was. It’s a mix: next time I’ll do this and that and this! Mixed: I’m dead on here, so what happens if I try something weird just to see what happens? The bright paint, the revving of the engines, the fog of war pushed away like snow, moving before the holy snow plow! In a turn-based tactical game, what’s better than the rippling click you get when you use the Advance Wars move arrow to quickly chug across the map?
The new Advance Wars on Switch is actually two old Advance Wars – Advance Wars itself and its sequel, Black Hole Rising. Both were originally made for the Game Boy Advance, and I remember having them bundled together on a cartridge. There’s something new this time around, though, primarily a new art style that’s been pretty unpopular from what I’ve seen. Gone is the chunky pixel art, replaced by shiny 3D models of slick tanks and lumbering soldiers.
Yes, I have to admit, it didn’t make a great first impression, but as time went on, I started to enjoy at least some elements of it. This sheen gives bombers and warships a greater toy-like quality. You can see the paint on the die cast body. While I’m not a fan of the individual soldiers, I like certain other details, like the ripples of light on the warm Mario sun water tiles, the way you can pull back and see the edge of the board and feel the way the whole thing is going somewhere Play on the table. I love CO’s new cartoon animation, full of life and character that I remember feeling in the GBA games. As such, Advance Wars on Switch still has its visual delights.
As for the two games themselves, I’ve always loved them and I’ll always defend Black Hole Rising, although some maps contain impassable pipes around the terrain and they don’t hold half as much control over the game as I remember, Despite the addition of a new tier 3 tank, as Edge once pointed out, by rendering it, the joke of having a super-powerful medium tank is, well, medium. Black Hole has some of my favorite maps, belonging to the tight little strategy grids found on newspaper sudoku pages. (I’m paraphrasing other sources like crazy today – this insight is from PC Gamer, it’s about Into the Breach, and I totally agree, it applies to Advance Wars as well.) It’s nice to be back in these places and see familiar continents again. The Black Hole event is initially locked – though you can unlock it by agreeing not to be annoyed by story spoilers. For me, though, this is the best place to learn about the intricacies of this incredibly elegant game.
If you’re new to Advance Wars, its Nintendo-esque conflict, it’s about as weird as it sounds when you’re dealing with recognizable battlefield hardware and a cheerful aesthetic in tank dashes. Beneath the surface, however, it’s a turn-based tactics game with a chess-like clarity. It’s compulsive.
Most maps plunge you into a skirmish with an enemy army, with the goal of destroying their units or raiding their headquarters. You move soldiers, tanks, and various other units, capture cities for resources, capture factories, airports, and ports to create new units using the resources you’re crafting, and when one of your units clashes with one of theirs Fight one on one. Terrain comes into play, changing range of movement and pushing your defense chance up and down. The point is that before each unit-vs-unit battle, you have all the information you need to tell you how things are going to play out. It’s about using that information as part of something bigger — taking individual tactical moments and turning them into strategy.
Even with the constant influx of new units and terrain types, even if you have different commanders with unique powers that can turn the tide of battle, tweaks like the fog of war and even the occasional new victory condition – even if you’re dealing with all that stuff, this The secret to the series is that the basics are always kept simple. Units will always follow the rock-paper-scissors dynamic, allowing you to hunt for winning matches. Resources will always unlock new units in the same order. Even the AI can be trusted to have the same weird quirks as you play the game. If you’re new to strategy and tactics, this is an ideal place to start, as all the individual pieces are so simple that you can easily start thinking about how they fit together. If you’re not new to the genre, I think it’s still exciting to see such an efficient design layout.
Playing any game now, it’s surprising to see how much Advanced Wars feels like a puzzle game long after they’ve lived entirely in memory. There’s often an early choice between propping up the economy and firing up the tanks or sprinting to a key control point and trying to take control of the map from there. I was worried at first. When I returned to Pikmin recently, I felt like, deep down, it was more of a puzzle game than a strategy game, and it was somewhat limiting for me. But while puzzle design is certainly an integral part of Advance Wars, I ultimately felt that as I played, you could still create your own luck and find it in a way that reminded me of the best strategy and tactics games. Solve your own encounters. Advance Wars is about constraints and logic, but it’s also about autonomy and player expression. In some ways, it combined to make me feel a little smarter than usual. Its parts are pretty simple, and it made me think about tactics more than I’ve found elsewhere, simply because there’s less noise between me and the tactics here.
Is this event exactly the same? Aside from the art style, I’m sure there are tweaks and changes that I haven’t noticed, but I recognize many quests and COs and their powers. Crucially, these games feel like playing them: skirmishing battles, often with specific problems to overcome.
There’s new stuff elsewhere, though none of it’s a weird invention for the side mode you get in something like Dual Strike, which, if memory serves me, contains a real-time mini-game, proper experimental stuff. Anyway: online and local multiplayer (I can’t test online with review code, but I’ll do something later), a mode where you do skirmishes with the CPU I’m really into, a for crafting and A design room for sharing custom maps, fun as always, a gallery and a shop. That store wasn’t as sinister as I had initially feared. As far as I know, you can earn coins during the campaign and spend them on multiplayer maps and CO music and graphics.
Finally, I need honesty, embarrassment, and moments of embarrassment. Apologize. When I was in my forties, even before I hit the front pages of the dailies, as much as I loved the series for its ingenuity and craftsmanship, I have to admit I find the premise behind Advance Wars a little harder to navigate now—than I was two years ago. It was trickier when I first discovered the series as a ten-year-old. I know: there are a lot of games about war, and there are a lot of tactical games about war, and a lot of games reduce war to maps, control points, and unit icons, and the cities to capture are just images of towers and where, when you bring When a unit crosses a river, you don’t need to think about what it will actually look like. I know this is a game made at least in part for kids, and it’s a very beautiful and well-conceived game.
But what struck me a bit this time around was how cheerful Advance Wars was, with those bright units and cheeky faces, those CO characters I’ve come to love over the years. In the past, I think I’ve always thought that Advance Wars was a game about children’s play, CO’s were kids, units were their tin soldiers and so on, and everyone was playing.
Even so, I sometimes find it a slightly surreal experience that I’ve never had before. When I’m dodging a mission on the Switch and have to win a painful win, I can’t help but think about, you know, what I’m actually doing in the game, and what the rock-paper-scissors units mean. Maybe it’s absurd: I’m not at all ambivalent about chess. I’m not ambivalent about Civilization, or rather, I’m happy to be, because I know the game wants me to. I’m not going to put any of these thoughts and caveats into an article I’m writing about Into the Breach. If that doesn’t make sense to you, I’ll readily admit it doesn’t make sense to me. But I also admit that I’ve started to have a vague ambiguity about Advance Wars.
When Chris recently reflected on Company of Heroes 3, which was released the day before the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he felt that the game’s setting and tone had finally been hit right. Advance Wars was delayed post-Invasion, with a very different setting and tone – of course, a large portion of its audience will be kids – and maybe that’s what bothers me. Advance Wars is nothing like warfare, even I know that. I would never try to pretend that anything else was true. I also know that there’s a thread running through the middle of a lot of interesting imaginative work that references real world things here, and it’s a basic superposition of ideas that makes them work in the first place. However, by playing this game and enjoying it, I sometimes ask myself: am I somehow belittling something that shouldn’t be?
Maybe, of course, I didn’t give the game enough credit. Or, to put it another way, am I criticizing the game when I should be criticizing myself? It’s a generous, elegant, efficient tactical game that I still love so much, I can still spend hours on it, and if you step back, it definitely makes you realize that you’re often doing pleasant things under the hood ugly things. This could be another layer to its design. When did things get easier? Perhaps, it’s a complex game where a person can meet on multiple levels, and the levels change from person to person.
iGamesNews
