Everyone got it whenNintendodelayed its Advance Wars remake after the real-world invasion of Ukraine by Russia echoed its goofy plotlines a little too closely. A year on, it’s seen fit to get it ready for a new release date.
We were huge Advance Wars fans back in the Game Boy Advance years, so there’s a true thrill to booting it back up in 2023 on theNintendo Switch, and being able to report that it’s effectively the return of another excellent vaulted franchise for Nintendo.
Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp
The new art style doesn’t spark that much joy in us, but the strategic genius at Advance Wars' heart is completely intact here, making for an excellent paired package of gaming greats on the Switch.Platform tested: Nintendo Switch
Plus ça change
In an era of remakes and remasters that blur the line between homage, faithful recreation and reimagining (we’re looking at you,Resident Evil 4andDead Space), Re-Boot Camp is a remaster that is refreshingly easy to understand.
It offers up both campaigns from the two Game Boy Advance games in the series, Advance Wars and Advance Wars: Black Hole Rising, in their entirety, with no added or changed mechanics but a total visual upgrade.
Out are the quaint pixel sprites that the original games used, replaced by simple and cartoony versions of the same units and characters rendered in 3D.
The colours are just as pop-bright and saturated, though, so the overall visual flavour is very much preserved, while the various commanding officers and characters have also had new, anime-style portraits drawn for their dialogue.
Playing through these classic campaigns and experimenting with other modes, we found ourselves swinging back and forth on the new art style.
On the one hand, it’s easy to read and utilitarian in a way that means you can quickly figure out situations and get a sense for each battle as you drop in, while the characters are as fun and punky as ever.
Equally, though, we dug out our GBA and played some of the original game and it didn’t take long to decide that the old days of pixels and sprites offered something this remake is missing - a little stylish edge that’s been lost.
It’s there in the music, too, where simple melodies are more grating now that they’re orchestrated instead of chip-tuned - not to mention the addition of saccharine voice acting that made us lean on the skip button.
That all feels harsh, though, and anyone who hasn’t played the originals is more likely to simply find this a charming world of primary-coloured armies and toy-soldier aesthetics that’s refreshingly upbeat. Anything beats the bizarrely dour looks of Days of Ruin on the DS, after all.
Getting started
While the graphical upgrade that’s been administered might be a matter of opinion, we’d say that Re-Boot Camp is more conclusively successful as far as its gameplay systems are concerned.
In quite a few hours of play, we haven’t spotted any mission changes at all from the original game, barring a more gentle on-ramp in the form of more telegraphed field training missions.
Much likeFire Emblem, Advance Wars all plays out on a simple grid, a battle map that is easy to digest but actually contains a lot of detail.
Each tile can give more or less cover to your units depending on its type, from wide-open roads and rivers to dense forests and cities offering protection.
You’ll move an array of unit types around these maps, comprising fragile infantry, durable tanks, long-range artillery, planes and boats alike. These have a rock-paper-scissors system of weaknesses and advantages that is a key part of any planning.
The further you get the more depth you’ll uncover, and Advance Wars is happy to layer things on fairly quickly - you might think you’re on top of things after a couple of missions, but it’ll then reveal factory tiles that can produce new units, for whichever army controls them, and you’ll start to see that this is a potentially hugely complex strategy game.
There’s a welcome cadence to the campaign, too. While it cleverly drip-feeds you new units and terrain types over time, it’s also not exactly baby stuff - there’s a fairly immediate challenge to the strategic puzzles it throws your way that might have been smoothed out in a truly new release.
Another layer is offered up by commanding officers, each of whom has a unique power they can use to potentially turn the tide. Your starting CO, Andy, can instantly part-repair all of his troops, for example, while enemy COs will be calling down blizzards and raising the range of their long-distance attacks at times.
It’s a welcome wrinkle that further adds to the sense that an Advance Wars matchup can get as complex as the designers like.
The full game promises a veritable wealth of key side content, too, from pass-the-Switch multiplayer with up to four players to online battles on maps, both from the campaign and those created entirely by users.
That last part is huge - a true toolset to create online maps and scenarios is exactly the sort of thing that can sustain a community for years, so we’re hoping the game gets a nice little presence going.
That engaging list of modes and options means that there’s every reason to think that this release will bring Advance Wars back into the limelight.
Plus, when you finish up the first campaign you can roll right into Black Hole Rising, the sequel, and experience an even more impressive arc that has some really clever ideas at play.
Re-Boot Camp has added itself to a growing list of hugely impressive re-releases in 2023, with the cold strategic core at its heart still beating calmly after all these years.
The visual update, as necessary as it is, has left us a little bit less enthused than we were hoping, but we think a lot of that is down to personal taste. The technical bones of Advance Wars' strategy match-ups are as strong as ever, crucially, making for another strategy gem on the Nintendo Switch.
