One Square Forward, Two Squares Back: Advance Wars in a Nutshell

I’m going to assume some familiarity with Advance Wars among the reading public. After all, if you want to find out what the game is, read all the other reviews which essentially describe what the game is rather than honestly reviewing anything about it.

Advance wars was originally a promising little game for the Gameboy Advance (minor digression on the soullessness of Nintendo making 5-6 Gameboy iterations). However as anyone could see playing for a few minutes, the game’s multiplayer (obviously the soul of a strategy game) was seriously unbalanced with a few CO’s (you pick your CO who gives you certain benefits and drawbacks to your forces; they also have a special power you can use when you’ve dealt and received enough damage, much like a limit break in the Final Fantasy universe) being dominant over the other chumps and a few units being the best. Hence one could say this game showed promise. Sadly this promise was not delivered upon, as no fundamental changes were made to gameplay in the next installment, Advance Wars 2, which featured the same fundamental mechanics, plus a few more CO’s of varying worth and a reworking of some CO’s to make things more balanced. Needless to say, the issue of balance was not addressed in any serious way. The only unit added was an even bigger tank, the neo-tank, I suppose to make other units feel even worse about themselves.
This game plays like it was made by some Chair Force general trying to prove the superiority of air units over, well, anything. Certainly the Navy comes in for a bruising in this game, as the units are expensive, worthless, and generally defenseless to boot. At any rate, the next installment, not counting the laughable Gamecube cash-in “tactical” (as in, you made a severe tactical error buying this game) FPS, just added a boatload of new, completely random units and a mess of CO’s and combinations for Dual Strike (using 2 CO’s at once).
Of course this just made the game more of a clusterfunk and addressed none of the fundamental issues plaguing the game. There is no reliable anti-tank unit, direct units rule over indirects like artillery, the air units are absurdly powerful especially when used by a CO who gets a bonus for using them, etc. Apparently there is an even newer game out which no one is going to play. I figure after three strikes, you’re out. These aren’t efforts you can just rack up because they mean nothing, like DUI’s or something.

-Alex Hufford