Wargroove ★★★☆☆

This was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously. Despite the medieval fantasy facelift the game feels immediately familiar and charming but with a lot of thoughtful tweaks and changes to systems to make them fresh and more engaging.

I am very fond of the critical hit system making unit placement and countering much more thoughtful than a simple rock paper scissors approach of damage types and weaknesses.

I also quite like them sticking to the idea of making the different commander units representative of the different infantry types in the game to the point of having a dog commander.

The problem, though, is that this was clearly made by people who loved Advance Wars and wanted to take making a new game in that style very seriously and as part of that they tried to actually make it balanced! I don’t want balance, I want fun little weirdos with ridiculous abilities bouncing off of each other!

Every army is the same other than their commander, without even any passive buffs. Where is the guy who gets bonuses for roads? The guy whose artillery sucks shit but gets super buffed spearmen or something? I understand that they wanted to create a viable multiplayer game but I am just here for the story mode.

I mentioned that the commanders are based off the different types of infantry but even then they all have the exact same stats and only differ in their charge-up ability. The dog doesn’t behave like a dog unit, the vampire doesn’t behave like a vampire unit, they are all just super-footsoldiers. It’s a real shame.

And of course the other problem with this being made by Advance Wars sickos is that the difficulty is skewed pretty highly. I don’t think it’s massively unreasonable but it was harder than I expected and I certainly didn’t want to replay everything on hard to grind out stars, which you need to do to unlock the completely unreasonably gated final level. I ended up just downloading a completed save file to play it and honestly it wasn’t even that difficult.