Advance Wars, A Legend in Turn Based Strategy
Advance Wars was originally released in America in 2001. It presented a very new system of turn based strategy. Since then, three franchise sequels have been released, all of them following the same basic formula, though adding on to the original. (Note: The newest game (Advance Wars Days of Ruin) is quite a bit different from the previous installments)
Unlike many other games, the player is able to produce units, leading to longer and ultimately more fulfilling battles. With the ability to bring reinforcements to the table using funds received at the end of every turn, many strategies are opened up that simply aren’t feasible in a game such as Military Madness where you’re stuck with what you have and once something is lost it’s gone forever.
In Advance Wars, infantry is used to capture buildings. They can capture cities (provide income and repair and resupply ground units), bases (provide income, produce, and repair and resupply ground units), airports (provide income, produce, and repair and resupply air units), ports (provide income, produce, and repair and resupply naval units), several other buildings and the all important HQ that, if captured, will cause the corresponding player to lose and turn over all buildings to the capturing player.
In order to prevent this, players have access to many different units, ranging from recon, tanks, fighters, bombers, and cruisers to battleships, artillery, helicopters, armored personnel carriers, anti-air, and submarines. Each unit costs a certain amount of money, for example, infantry are cheap and weak, costing 1,ooo and Battleships have massive long range cannons that can do a tremendous amount of damage for 28,000.
Everyone has a different play style, and Advance Wars caters to that. Every player chooses a CO at the beginning of the game (in Advance Wars Dual Strike the player may choose two). Each CO (Commanding Officer) has certain effects on their troops, for example Max’s direct attack troops such as tanks and anti-air have high attack power, but his ranged units have lower firepower and one less range than normal. All of Kanbei’s units are more expensive than other COs, but they boast more firepower. Along with these multipliers, COs all have a power and super power that are built up as units take and deal damage. When released, these can cause massive amounts of damage to the enemy, for instance Hawke (my favorite CO)’s super power takes longer to charge than other COs, but causes 2 damage (units have 10 health) to enemy units and heals your own units by 2. It’s important to choose a CO that fits your play style.
Advance Wars has tons of replay value. I would recommend Advance Wars Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS.
There is an incredible amount of content in this game. It has a good campaign, a decent map editor (the one in Days of Ruin is much better), survival modes, a weird mini game, tons of versus maps, a war room that has challenging maps along with multiple difficulties, the ability to battle on two different fronts using the DS’s two screens, and more. A lot of work went into it and it I logged over 250 hours on it. I consider it one of the best strategy games of all time.
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