Thanks to this 1001 list, I'm a fan of Advance Wars. It still clings onto the tenth spot on The Topper Than That Top 10 list. I doubt it'll still be there when we come to judge the next batch of fifty must play video games, but the point is that it made quite the lasting impression.
I know nothing of Battalion Wars. I read that it's a spin-off of Advance Wars. Huh. Is it now? I guess we better investigate this one on the double.
Frustrations
This GameCube title starts up looking... well, it looks on the cheap side, if you know what I mean. Low budget, or low expectations, kinda thing. It's such a look that I immediately question whether I've accidentally skipped over an important video or something because aside from a title screen, there is no context to this screen. We are dumped straight onto a map, the next mission waiting for us.
That's an alarmingly comic font. Though, to be fair, Advance Wars was a heavily stylized depiction of war. No, let's embrace Battalion Wars. Let's imagine ourselves to be a young lad playing with toy soldiers. What fun can we find for ourselves here?
Oh, here's the introduction I've been looking for. We're presumably playing as one of these armies, perched on either side of the DMZ. It sure seems a little chunky and toy-like. If I didn't know this was an Advance Wars spin-off, I wouldn't be able to link the two games together, I reckon.
Could it be that the war we apparently find ourselves may be close to dissolving? Could peace be on the horizon? We wouldn't have much of a game if it were, but that seems to be how our first mission starts.
Field exercises to entertain the troops. And keep them battle-ready, obviously. Excellent idea, whoever thought of it - the subtitles are annoyingly out of sync for this video. Not sure why.
Anyway, it's time to see what Battalion Wars is all about.
Fun Times
So this is the direction the spin-off decides to take, is it? A third-person action game where we are the boots on the ground, eh? Ok. Let's see where it goes.
The controls are a little awkward, owing to the lack of camera controls, but they aren't awful. The left shoulder button locks onto a target, allowing us to strafe around, dodge roll with the B button, and of course attack with the A button, continually firing as long as our cooldown timer allows. Outside of combat, exaggerated jumping and funny runs make for some cartoony animations.
Definitely a game of toy soldiers, then.
Just beyond the safety of our camp, though, lurks a dirty Tundran SPY! For you, my friend, the war is over...
We waddle down the hillside to catch up with him, only to find he's installed a listening post. Is this an Advance Wars spin-off, or a Dawn of War one?
Destroying them is laughably easy, and looks to be our next mission.
In fact, everything this spy leaves behind is quite easy to blow to bits. It's the spy himself that is proving to be tricky. I need some extra firepower. I need a squad to command.
A press of the X button grabs their attention and changes their stance from stand around thumb-twiddling to follow me and provide some fire support, and locking onto a target and pressing the Y button issues a command to focus fire until health bars disappear.
Importantly, these orders allow you to do your own thing while everything explodes around you. Including blowing up stuff on your own to free some prisoners and reveal a recon vehicle to use.
Further Frustrations
Ooh, it's not fun to drive this thing. It's got controls straight out of Halo. Light and bouncy but a right pain in the arse to point in the right direction. Luckily, I'm not in the heat of a firefight, but it might just change in a moment...
It's a strange game, is Battalion Wars. I think I feel that way because I'm not the target audience, but for all its quirks, it does feel like it has more worth than it looks to have on the surface. Ordering troops around, driving vehicles, lots of explosions - it sure looks like we can have some fun here, despite the weird presentation.
Further Fun Times
The next mission is action-packed from the start, and that spy stands no chance. Squad at the ready, we get to obliterate anything put in front of us and even get to hop into mounted machine guns to unleash all kinds of hell upon the Tundran forces.
The characters want to share in the fun, too, casually dropping airstrikes to clear the path before us. It really does feel like a couple of kids just fighting with their toys. And toy soldier armies aren't complete without tanks.
Feeling utterly invincible inside my dinky little tank, what's the best course of action for all this infinite ammo?
The Commander wanted me to order my troops to hang back, but in the heat of the battle, micromanaging squads sounded like a faff, so I went in guns blazing and hoped for the best. Lock-on aiming and infinite ammo - what could go wrong?
So Battalion Wars is a little game about linear missions and squad management and, ultimately, blowing stuff up and having fun. But it's not mindless, and I don't think you can just chuck units at a problem until it goes away. There's got to be some strategy going on. This can't be a walk in the park. I keep feeling like there's more to it than this. What's next?
Further Frustrations
Ah. Yes. This is more like it. Ambushed by tanks and fiddling with troop selection. Managing the squads in the heat of action. Picking the right tools for the job.
The C-stick switches between the troop's types you have available to you. Here, basic infantry and rocketmen. When you've picked a squad, you can jump into it, possessing one of its units and becoming them for a little while.
It took a little while to figure that out entirely, it must be said. In the meantime, troops were cut down and wiped out, because rifles don't do much against armoured vehicles, don't you know?
This whole mission, defending a radar post from an attack on two fronts, relies on you zipping between troop types to face infantry on one side and vehicles on the other. You can at least plonk units into machine-gun nests or have them hold their position. Or, like me, run around in reaction to a threat, rather than proactively setting myself up.
I know we're only in the third mission, and we're all still learning, but the layout of this mission is a bit of a letdown. It's a bit choppy. It's like a wave shooter, only the waves don't start to move until you go out to meet them. A game for the young'uns. Cut it some slack.
Smartly, and unexpectedly, my opponent drops troops right into the middle of the camp via a helicopter. Our welcoming party gave them a few rockets in breach of the Geneva Convention, I'm sure.
After some tank skirmishing, that was that. Anyone else finding it weird how all these enemy commanders are casually chatting to each other? I'm not sure what these characterisations are about. They're all voiced, stereotypically it must be said. Doesn't stop it from feeling a little strange, though.
After running around and blowing everything up, and sometimes driving around and blowing it up, I had a decent handle on Battalion Wars. Enough to say that I'd had enough.
Final Word
There's nothing wrong with Battalion Wars if what you've seen is exciting. But I think it's a little too fiddly for me to get much out of it.
Whether it's the control scheme or my grasp of it, I'm not sure. I enjoy just unloading everything into a target (it was practically my strategy for all of Dawn of War), but the managing of units and the switching between the best troop for the situation feels like one step too far.
Could you get through a sizable chunk of the game without worrying about that? I bet you could, yes. It seems quite forgiving. I didn't run out of troops and think they respawned after running into a tank without the right weaponry, but I mostly didn't know what anyone else was doing. I knew what I was doing. I knew what I ordered someone to do. I'm not even sure who those someones were for the most part, though. I just had fire support, and that's fine by me.
So Battalion Wars is fun, yes, but is it worth sticking around for? Probably, yes. But for me? Ehhhhhh... not so sure on that. I can see the Advance Wars influences easy enough, but this isn't Advance Wars. Battalion Wars is its own thing and does its own thing as best as it can. It definitely has more going on under the hood than the box cover and menus would suggest.
I might give it another few missions to see what it progresses into but, to be quite honest, I've seen the next few games on the 1001 list, and I'm far more excited by other titles.
Nice to know Battalion Wars exists though, and it is definitely something different to what you're probably used to. Weird and childish, but still recommendable.
Fun Facts
If you thought that the connection to Advance Wars was minimal, you'd be right. It wasn't even developed with any link in mind.
Battalion Wars, developed by Kuju, first released in 2005.
Version played: GameCube, 2005, via emulation.