As much as I wanted to love Battle Worlds: Kronos, especially considering we aren’t getting a new Advance Wars anytime soon, I just couldn’t.

Kronos has you playing as the Yerla faction, a highly technologized army, fighting for the destiny of the planet as it is torn by war and destruction. Whilst the plot is set up good, it does not manage to compel the player, sadly.

Battle Worlds: Kronos is a turn-based strategy game, using the hexagonal movement system. The game begins with an optional tutorial, though, something unique to Kronos is that you can have a tutorial guide throughout the whole game in the screen’s corner. Keep in mind it is a very difficult game.

Whilst this sort of gameplay is not bad by any means, Kronos does not do a good job of executing it. The graphics are dated, like something you’d find from the early 2000s. And it does not help the game is bogged by the serious plague of unrewarding and unsatisfying gameplay. It feels like a mixtape on repeat after every loss. Part of that dissatisfaction also comes from its unorganized user interface. There is just too much going on and way too many ‘button’ options for one to comprehend. The organization of it all prevented me from any long play sessions. It also does not feel visually striking – the menu was stale and lacked inspiration. The menu isn’t the only thing lacking inspiration either as there is little diversity in the maps. Despite the large offering of maps/levels, that means nothing if they all are unoriginal in terms of appearance. Whilst the diversity issue could be fixed with a map-editor, that was also left out of the Nintendo Switch version (Only available on PC).

Another point of contention with maps lies within the local multiplayer on offering (it’s worth mentioning there is no online multiplayer present). In local multiplayer, the maps were designed with that intent in mind – this means that not every map is playable locally.

All negativity aside, there are some points of interest. For example, there was care put into the diversity of different units and buildings (Infantry, Airborne, Naval, and Ground). Another point of interest is its framerate – It remained constant and smooth which helped in justifying a playthrough. Another point of attention is the sheer amount of story missions (even if the story wasn’t for me, I can not argue the length of it). There are three different campaigns each of which have several missions, and all of them overarching into one big story.

Whilst I can’t justify anyone purchasing this title, there was effort put in at least… The developer’s pride for an Advance Wars style game shined through, which I can appreciate. It has its issues whether it be a cluttered user interface, bad graphics, and similar environments, which can make it easy to overlook this title, and I can’t say you’d be missing much. If you are an Advance Wars fan, you might want to try looking elsewhere, that is, if you can’t overlook these points of concern (a good starting place might be Chucklefish’s latest hit – Wargroove).