[GRWC8] Advance Wars [Review]

Anonymous wrote:Advance Wars

I’m addicted to Advance Wars. I play it every day. I play it immediately after I wake up - I play it while on the bus. I play it while I’m walking to wherever I’m going, I play it when I’m there; under the table, behind the tutor’s back. I play it at the dinner table - I play it while I’m watching a film. I play it on the toilet. I play it in bed into the early hours as it eats into my sleep. Tomorrow can wait, this is important. It takes a…

‘Feck off, this is impossible! How on Earth is this level possible when they send a sodding army after you??’

…to finally divorce the game forever. Or so I say, every time, every night. And...



…repeat.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. I always believed, as Pro Evolution Soccer 1-to-4 and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 1-to-3 proved so devastatingly, that videogames were only inherently addictive when the game involved quick reflexes and such realistically captured animation that responded to your ever-dexterous thumb.

A turn-based strategy game does not follow this line of thinking. Advance Wars is unique in having a learning curve that’s shaped like the gentlest, never-ending hill that climbs and climbs through the course of your life and only ends when it reaches Heaven and you’re in a coffin. For you never stop learning, never stop improving. And there’s nothing more satisfying in your videogame career than the times you start a videogame feeling like a total novice and so many years later feel like an expert. Or when you begin a campaign dumbfounded by the praise heaped on a game and by its end you are gasping for air trying to come up with your own superlatives to describe the turn around of affections.

Advance Wars has that ‘one-more-go’ factor entirely because it does not rely on quick reflexes; fail a level and you’ll curse the game, decrying that it’s impossible, but you’ll ultimately give it another go because as long as you can carefully determine your moves and stay a step ahead of the A.I.’s deadly attack range, there’s always a chance. That is its key - the gameplay is so precise. Success in real life war may depend on a million variables, but Advance Wars’ simplicity and playability lies in the basic range of options available to you within one move: build or move, take over a building or attack. Its depth, however, lies in the range of possibilities that accumulate over the course of several of the game’s turns, meaning you can potentially re-try the same level over and over again and each time be in an entirely different situation than before. The A.I. will react to every decision you make and in turn so will you react to theirs. It can be a case of trial and error, of making mistakes and learning from them and correcting it next time.

Its aesthetically pleasing visual style of bright pop-art colours and crisp pixels does more than allow the game to be assessable to all; the different elements of the map like the mountains and the forest are cleanly defined. It’s humorous that anyone dismissive of the game’s apparently ‘child-ish’ visuals would forget that what appears on the screen is nothing more than a graphic representation of what’s below. A square on the map showing two trees is actually a forest, a building actually a city. It’s a clever feature of the game that pressing R1 on any part of the map will show a little illustration of the area in a more realistic fashion. And of course attacking another unit will initiate a beautiful animated sequence with the one army soldier on the map actually representing an infantry of 5 soldiers.

It says a lot that for any level that you do find yourself playing over and over what must amount to hundreds of attempts and no end of mental torture at your inadequacy, that finally finishing it with the required S rank (or better; a perfect 999 score) is met with feelings of unparalleled happiness and a tinge of sadness. Yes! I finally beat the bastard. No! I was really quite enjoying the challenge of that.

And that, surely, is the mark of a classic game.


…


But saying all that, the music is terribly repetitive and will give you a mighty ear ache. You might want to switch it off, and the same can be said of the unnecessary animations of your units moving across the map and - as beautiful as they are - the battle animations. Not wanting to be delayed by these little annoyances will mark your progression from someone who was appreciating all the joy the game has to offer to someone who now views the map as a tactical playground and the units on it as like the movable pieces on a chess board. Your tactical awareness becomes so honed that you’ll make decisions on your current move thinking 5 steps ahead. You’ll get so into the game as to not realise that you're thinking twice as fast as you was when you could only manage a B on your favourite War Room level.

Ah, the War Room. Unlike the Campaign mode, you can replay (over and over) any of the 20 levels with any character you like. And as such, your character’s special power (accessed after winning battles and filling up a bar) will be a factor in who you pick. As will your opponent and their special power, and how yours can disable theirs. Drake, for instance, has the rather annoying ability to cause tidal waves that knock off a few HP off every unit of yours. Andy, on the other hand, has the handy ability to repair a few HP on every unit of yours.

If you’re up against Grit, a long-range specialist, and you choose Max, a short-range specialist, and Grit builds up his power bar and initializes it, if you’re in range you’ve either got to scamper or attack with all you’ve got. And since with Max your movement and range is limited, you’ve got to make your decision to attack in preparation of Grit’s long range assault because it can, in one sweeping move, eliminate every unit of yours and leave you weeping. The War Room level Ridge Island was designed for brilliant tactical games of cat and mouse.

What the game doesn’t do is warn you of the A.I.’s power bar level on your turn, so you’ve got to be aware of it on its turn and make an educated guess of when it’ll fill up so you can, in the case of facing against Grit, make the decision to attack or keep your distance. There are other niggling faults too, such as how the option to ‘delete unit’ serves no purpose, since doing so will not earn you back a fraction of the what it cost to acquire the unit, nor will it avoid hampering your rank at the end of the level, which factors in how many units you lost. There is also the matter of whenever you build a unit you have to wait until your next turn to be able to use it. It’s a problem when you’re being overwrought with enemy tanks from all angles and can’t escape the constant battering you’re taking. Build and be endlessly killed. But all this really means is, like every problem the A.I. throws at you, you deal with it. You plan ahead. But 2 player vs. games can be never-ending if your winning opponent decides to prolong the misery by slowly taking over your buildings, thus limiting the money you bring in, while destroying all your expensive units. He’ll consider it as him giving you a chance to come back; you’ll know he’s being an arrogant patronising swine taking unrepentant bliss in your suffering.

Suffering is not a fiitting word to end this review on. Advance Wars is a joy - one of the most endlessly challenging games around; one whose perfected and well-balanced rule set will seep into your subconscious. It’s not just a classic example of how absorbing the simple playability of videogames can be: its genius.