ADVANCE WARS DARK CONFLICT CHARACTERS SERIES

Tweaks like how CO powers are no longer fucking ridiculous. Tweaks to near-perfection are welcome when they work like these do.

ADVANCE WARS DARK CONFLICT CHARACTERS SERIES

Seeing as it isn't.īut this is still no bad thing, as it's still Advance Wars: one of the finest series in handheld history. None of it feels like a hamfisted attempt to breathe new life into proceedings, but none of it feels especially new. A few new units thrown into the mix, a few old ones surgically removed - flare units to light up distant fog of war, anti-tank cannons to kablooey tanks, Neo Tanks and Mega Tanks amalgamated into the War Tank etc. There are other notable changes to the formula - just about enough for this to be released as a bona fide sequel - but mainly they do feel like balancing fixes. Bishop takes pawn five, BISHOP GETS NUKED. This is chess with tanks, people, just as it always has been. Things are a bit less bright - the dialogue is still stomach-churningly bad, the storyline is best left ignored and the characters are handily regimented into 'I AM GOOD' and 'I AM NOT GOOD' categories, just in case you didn't understand they're a bit of a bastard from how they want to destroy the world/steal things/hurt puppies/launch ballistic missile strikes on unarmoured ground troops.īut it's still Advance Wars, so none of that crap actually matters. Such a huge difference this makes too, what with it changing. So the big thing with the new Advance Wars: Dark Conflict is that it's taken on a darker tone, presenting things in a more serious light than before and eschewing the Tellytubbies-style presentation of the past conflicts. Perhaps it was that the dreary post-apocalyptic setting of Dark Conflict didn't go down well - so why not just change it up for the next game, or bring back the world of previous games? It seems a shame to throw the baby out with the bathwater, especially with one of the world's leading strategy franchises.AW masquerades behind this sheen of cutesy and happy-go-lucky warfare, but it's so upsetting to think of these poor pawns: conscripted into a service they probably don't fully understand, fighting people for reasons they don't know and dying on foreign soils, never to see their loved ones again.īut it's still so bloody good on the train. That was in 2008, and there hasn't been a new Advance Wars since. Nintendo and developer Intelligent Systems had a good run of handheld sequels and even a console spin-off, Battalion Wars, but the franchise seemed to run aground when it tossed out its established characters and world with Advance Wars: Dark Conflict (or Days of Ruin in some territories), replacing them with a radically pared-down game and a bleak story to match the new title. Each game sees you taking command of an army trying to defend a nation (and sometimes the world) and could seem rather dry were it not for the colourful COs you get to play as and the crucial addition of CO powers that dramatically affect the game mechanics.

Advance Wars The Nintendo franchise that has been going a lot longer than most westerners think (the first game to hit Europe and the US was Advance Wars in 2001/2002, but the Wars series had been going strong in Japan since 1988), Advance Wars is a favourite of many a strategy nut, its deceptively simple brand of turn-based combat hiding-games that are both incredibly addictive and fiendishly difficult to truly complete.

Advance wars dark conflict characters