PN Review: Advance Wars (Wii U Virtual Console)
Being a fan of strategy game, I was pleased to have the opportunity to review Advance Wars when it released on the Wii U Virtual Console. Having played the original release of Advance Wars on the GameBoy Advance was the biggest reason I wanted to get my hands on the Virtual Console release. My previous experience with Advance Wars was quite limited due to the fact that the original version I played was actually my brothers so I really didn’t get to see everything that the game could provide. So it is needless to say that this go around with Advance Wars on the Wii U left me with some surprises.
Advance Wars on the Wii U is much more in-depth than what I had experienced the first time around. Being familiar with strategy games, I had just jumped into the campaign my brother had started during my prior experience without going through the tutorial missions. This time around I took the time to complete ‘Field Training’ which is a 13 mission long tutorial session that will help you learn the details of battle in Advance Wars. This is where I learned that there was much more to Advance Wars than I was previously aware of.
Advance Wars contains some of the more basic strategy game concepts such as capturing bases, building extra units, various strong and weak points of different units, and other unit capabilities. Some things I did not know previously is that detailed ‘intel’ or information was provided about various units by selecting them with a special button, that one could see the offensive range of any particular unit, or that terrain had an effect on battle by changing the defensive status of a unit. These things may seem pretty obvious but for someone who had not played the game before very extensively or skipped the tutorial completely, this information is new and quite helpful.
CO Powers were probably the biggest revelation I experienced during my time with Advance Wars on Wii U. CO’s are the NPC characters that ‘command’ the armies in Advance Wars. Each CO has a special power which is charged up during battle. When you deal damage to an enemy during battle, your CO’s power gets charged up a little more. Each CO’s power is different and provides a unique advantage to your units in battle. This was extremely helpful to know this time around and came in handy a few times during the battles.
Advance Wars provides much of the same experience as the original Game Boy Advance title. Players will have the opportunity to create maps, buy maps, play local multiplayer, and much more. Unfortunately, due to the missing ‘link’ capabilities, Link Mode (which would have made for a good online mode) is completely useless. Link Mode also allowed the opportunity to trade maps using the Game Boy Advance, which again is useless due to the lack of online features. I wasn’t expecting any of the Link Modes to work but if Nintendo had decided to add online capabilities to Advance Wars on Virtual Console, it would have pushed the Advance Wars experience far beyond what it was for Game Boy Advance. Even though Link Mode is an entire portion of Advance Wars that is essentially dead, the core Advance Wars experience is intact and a lot of fun.
The Game Boy Advance graphics look great on both my big flat screen TV and on the GamePad. There are other options available to improve the game graphically which can be accessed by touching the GamePad touchscreen. I didn’t find that ‘Screen Smoothing’ or ‘Perfect-Pixel Mode’ improved the graphics on my TV to any great degree but that was not much of a concern considering the game still looked quite good on the big screen anyways.
Advance Wars is still as much fun as I remember and getting a chance to play through the tutorials has helped me learn much more of the game than I knew before. For those that are seasoned CO’s and would like to jump straight into the campaign mode, the tutorial can be skipped by playing the final tutorial mission (which is something else I did not know before). Those who are new to Advance Wars I would encourage to play through the tutorial as it provides a lot of good information that will help during the campaign. Overall, Advance Wars is a solid retro strategy game experience and a great game for anyone who is a big fan or war games or strategy games.
