Battalion Wars

War made adorable

Reviewed by noufa on June 17, 2007  |  report this review

This game was released as a sequel to the very popular Advance Wars for Gameboy Advance. However game play is real-time rather than turn-based. The player is dropped in the middle of fighting. This means more action & slightly less emphasis on strategy. This alienated a lot of the Advance Wars fans, which is a shame because this is a very fun game: infantry look like little kids wearing dad's army gear. There is no blood or gore, dead soldiers just spirit away as cartoonish skulls. Your men break out in dance after winning a mission. Opposing commanders flirt via radio in the heat of battle.

One might argue that this is too much fun for a war game. Wouldn’t be an issue if the game had been set in Mario Land or a distant post-apocalyptic future. Instead, you command a group of "Western" forces that behaves like a caricature of the American military. The initial enemy looks suspiciously like the old Soviet Union. You later team up against another army led by a "Kaiser" who is a dead ringer for Colonel Klink from Hogan's Heroes. Most of the enemies aren't robots or magical beasts. They’re conventional modern soldiers using tanks, infantry & jets.

In the 4 bonus missions, you get a chance to play as the other armies. The chance to see things from a different perspective is part of the game’s subtle war-skeptic message. The creators of the game were smart enough to know that this is just a game. While realistic videogame portrayals of death are gross, no one’s ever hurt by a video game. Videogame violence has the perverse effect of making death & destruction seem palatable, even fun. See GTA.

So rather than a game that shows the brutality of war, Battalion Wars highlights the absurd nature of war. Listen carefully to hear your infantry grumble about feeling like pawns & wishing they had stayed in school. Alliances are forged & broken on a whim. The instruction booklet closes with the famous quote from Bertrand Russell: "War does not determine who is right, only who is left."

This isn’t a preachy anti-war propaganda piece. The heart of the game is still strategy. Learn to dispatch tanks against infantry, bazookas against tanks, infantry against bazookas, etc. The unit dispatch system is clumsy: you’re forced to dispatch single units or batches of like units. There are times where it would be nice to add a flamethrower to the rocket group. Battalion Wars, like chess, acknowledges that the strategy behind simulated war can be fascinating. But this isn’t war-porn.

My only other complaint is the lack of a multi-player mode. The Wii version does have a multi-player mode. The challenge of beating every level with a 100% ranking kept my interest. Though I still can’t get higher than 98% on the Cenotaph level…

Bonus Mission 4

Hint by Demo on September 17, 2006  |  report this hint

Get an overall of 90% on the fourth Campaign