Advance Wars
- July 04, 2001 16:15 PM PST
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The worlds of turn-based strategy, totalitarian tactical warfare, and cute, colorful anime characters violently clash?right in the palm of your hand.
Small Soliders. Big Heads.Cute little tanks. Cuter little anime girl despots brandishing maniacal control over an entire legion of adorable bazooka-wielding death squadrons. Advance Wars is a turn-based tactical strategy game that?s currently taking GBA owners in Japan by storm?soon we?ll find out what all the fuss is about.
Advance Wars is played on a Shining Force-like square grid, where up to 4 players take turns positioning their armies and getting into mini-skirmishes that play out like the old Sega Saturn game Dragon Force. All the elements of a classic war strategy game are in place?certain units are better suited to destroying others on certain terrain; capturing cities gives you more money per turn; each captured factory lets you build more units per round. And while the different generals each have control over the same unit types, they each have their own special traits to differentiate them?from faster city-conquering skills to the ability to unleash blizzards that slow enemy troops to a turtles? pace.
An Army of One (to Four)
The game features a story-driven single player campaign that pits you against a host of cartoonishly evil empires, but also features a strong multiplayer mode with the potential of sucking away days of your free time. Since Advance Wars is turn-based, 4 people can play with one GBA and one cart just by passing the Game Boy Advance around; a multilink option just makes it so you can see your troops when you?re getting attacked. The graphics in the preview version were simple, cartoony, clean, and very charismatic?but Advance War?s secret weapon is its deceptively straightforward gameplay. The rules are easy to pick up, but even our short time with the game left us with a strange, disturbing desire for more.
