Advance Wars: Days of Ruin Review

Intelligent Systems’ Advance Wars series must have seriously confused that “love and war” saying. Previously the cute, harmless commanding officers (COs) and bright, colorful units and levels directly contrasted the ideas behind capturing cities, building armies, and killing enemies. Three iterations of Advance Wars ravaged many a handheld screen for years, but things have changed. The Orange Star, Blue Moon, Yellow Comet, and Green Earth forces are nowhere to be seen. Gone are the Andys and Jakes of Advance Wars past; their cute stories and simple relationships are never to be seen again.

Days of Ruin, the latest chapter, takes things into darker and less-cheery territories than its predecessors. The world has been reduced to rubble, rogue armies terrorize the land, and order is compromised—only a few groups fight to restore balance and peace. One of these groups, “Brenner’s Wolves”, stumbles upon a wandering survivor named Will. Will and Co. run along a few more survivors on their tour of the land, and the story goes hand-in-hand with their findings along the way. The survivors, as one would guess, are restless and generally pretty annoying. If the constant war and fear of terror wasn’t enough, the survivors also constantly fear the “Green Thumb” virus, a disease that essentially turns its victims into walking, talking, suffering, and dying flower patches. It is clear in every cut-scene that the spirit of the past three games has been laid to waste.

Some of you out there might be thinking, “Alright, this is what I’m talking about! I love my gruesome, ruthless war stories about anime characters being bombed, killed, and tortured by a viral disease.” I really did not dig the change, and most certainly did not expect this sort of thing from a Nintendo franchise. A traditional, successful shift in style from light-to-dark would be reminiscent of Ocarina of Time to Twilight Princess, not Dual Strike to Days of Ruin. I felt like everything was far too cryptic. At a point that I later realized was exactly halfway through the game, I stopped watching cut-scenes. I stopped caring about the story, couldn’t stand the hokey anime-style dialog, and didn’t want to stomach more depressing overtones.

To clarify, I was not literally upset about Andy or Jake being gone. Video game dialog could use a little less spunk and cheese. By a little, I mean a lot. The story is not vital to Advance Wars, so the mood change fortunately doesn’t obliterate the merits of an otherwise great strategy game. However, a few other factors still work against Days of Ruin. Hardcore fans of the franchise will either love the game for it being a lot more of the same or similar fun, or hate it for removing a lot of familiar modes and units.

To start, the War Room is gone. There is not a Hard campaign. You can not switch between COs or carry out Dual Strikes. A lot of units have been dropped out of the war: say goodbye to neo tanks, mega tanks, and stealth planes. There are a few others missing as well. Many would consider Days of Ruin to be a huge step backward from Dual Strike, which was easily the beefiest Advance Wars game in the series. That would be an incorrect assumption.

Although Days of Ruin does not feature the enormous quantity of stuff, I think it balances out the units and maps incredibly well. First of all, the new terrain types create all kinds of obstructions that have to be strategically thought about: thinking about movement costs is now incredibly important, as well as judging (and checking) enemy location and movement/attack radius. Second, the new units are fairly placed and work brilliantly in the game. The new anti-tank unit is the only indirect attack unit that can counter-attack: though you can not drive it next to a tank and start shooting, it won’t be a sitting duck when pesky infantry or recon units come along to attack. Speaking of infantry, bike units are able to traverse longer distances and capture cities like infantry units. Their only additional strategic element lies in their movement type, which is different than regular units. Since they have tires, they can not cross certain kinds of terrain as easily and can’t even approach mountains. Other new units include the seaplane (which can attack any unit), the gunboat (a disposable, single-attack naval unit), and the flare (useful for the scarce Fog of War scenarios), among a few others.

Mission objectives are generally laid out very well and there are a decent amount of “puzzle maps”, where the objective isn’t to destroy everything as much as it is to purely outsmart your enemy. I enjoyed these maps but they involved a lot of trial and error, so practice patience. Maps where brute force was essential were very entertaining. A lot of times I would beef up my army and simply flood the enemy territory until I blocked off their route to their headquarters or factories. Then I had time to capture the territories and win the fight. Creating effective choke points and roadblocks are keys to mastering Advance Wars, and Days of Ruin often gives you the opportunity to do so.

Unfortunately there are a few flaws that are not so subjective to experience or familiarity with Advance Wars. First of all, the matured graphics are not colorful or cheery. In fact, they are often discolored and bland. The bright green plains and blue oceans of the past have been starved and polluted to shades of purplish brown and murky green. The animated attack sequences are uglier than they were in the first Advance Wars; strangely the detailed 2D sprites and backgrounds from before have been replaced with hideous, blurry images. The smoke and fire effects are even uglier than before. What is the deal?

Finally, as far as I am concerned, getting rid of a lot of features for the “sake” of adding WiFi online play is a stupid idea. Advance Wars makes a fantastic multiplayer experience, do not get me wrong, and being able to play with a huge number of custom maps is always a treat, but I for one have spent about 99% of my personal experience with Advance Wars playing single-player maps, and having the dozens and dozens of War Room maps and other features was a much better idea than adding WiFi multiplayer. To clarify, there is nothing wrong with the multiplayer. It works well and even lets you use voice chat features.

All in all Advance Wars: Days of Ruin falls short of being as good as Dual Strike or even the first two Advance Wars games. Dual Strike, as I called it in 2005, was the best DS game of its time. In reflection I consider that accurate. Although in all technicalities I could and should view this as the worst Advance Wars to date, I actually consider it among its predecessors as I consider Metal Gear Solid 2 among the other MGS games: some black sheep fit well enough in the crowd to be acceptable.