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Advance Wars: Days of Ruin
As part of the “backlog cull”, I’m giving myself some permission to remove games after an “honest try” rather than a full play-through. Most of the games that fall under this are ones that I got for free or particularly cheap which then sat on my backlog for years. I got Advance Wars: Days of Ruin from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
edgehopper when he won a second copy of it in a competition of some sort, maybe three years ago. It’s not really my thing, but it seemed at least worth a try.
I had it mistakenly labeled as an RTS, but there’s nothing “real time” about it. It’s a turn-based strategy puzzle game. You have various types of units that you move on your turn; they can move set distances on a grid and deal mostly-nonrandom damage when they attack other units (in a very complicated variant of the standard rock-paper-scissors what-beats-what setup) ; and every battle has a set selection of units that start in specific positions and do not have an carry-over rpg elements from other battles. (A tank can get slightly stronger by killing units in one battle, but you’ll only have a level 1 tank in the next battle whether the stronger one survived or not.) You can capture factories and build new units to bring into battle, but the starting units available in each battle are always the same. So the game plays out more like chess or a tabletop wargame than a tactical rpg.
I tend to like rpg elements for two reasons: One is variable difficulty: if you can’t beat something you can grind until you get past it, and if you think the game is too easy you can challenge yourself. The second is customizability: You can choose your characters/skills/spells to fit with the play style you enjoy, and often the strategy involved (as I noted for FF12: Revenant Wings) is choosing what to bring into battle with you. I tend to make up for my failings in tactics with a decent strategy and some overwhelming force, but this game doesn’t provide that option.
The first half of the battles or so keep introducing new factors—using factories to make new units, anti-tank units, carriers, air units, naval units. The tutorial does a good job of explaining them as you go along. There are 26 “story” missions, plus free missions that unlock as you do the story, a free mode where you can customize the challenges, and a multiplayer mode.
The campaign mode has a plot that plays out in cutscenes between battles. The “days of ruin” refer to the post-apocalyptic setting of the game, when a world of mechanized factories and advanced science has been nearly destroyed by meteors and human survivors scramble for survival. There’s a “chapter ending” after mission #10 that wraps up most of the early plotlines; that’s where I stopped.
This is definitely a good stylus game. The series dates back to the NES, I believe, but I can’t imagine how slow it would be playing it crosskey-only. The play control in general is pretty good; my one compliant about pacing is watching the attacking animation for each unit over and over again.
It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t call it a bad game by any means. If you like wargame strategy and tactics, you’d probably like it just fine.
edgehopper when he won a second copy of it in a competition of some sort, maybe three years ago. It’s not really my thing, but it seemed at least worth a try.I had it mistakenly labeled as an RTS, but there’s nothing “real time” about it. It’s a turn-based strategy puzzle game. You have various types of units that you move on your turn; they can move set distances on a grid and deal mostly-nonrandom damage when they attack other units (in a very complicated variant of the standard rock-paper-scissors what-beats-what setup) ; and every battle has a set selection of units that start in specific positions and do not have an carry-over rpg elements from other battles. (A tank can get slightly stronger by killing units in one battle, but you’ll only have a level 1 tank in the next battle whether the stronger one survived or not.) You can capture factories and build new units to bring into battle, but the starting units available in each battle are always the same. So the game plays out more like chess or a tabletop wargame than a tactical rpg.
I tend to like rpg elements for two reasons: One is variable difficulty: if you can’t beat something you can grind until you get past it, and if you think the game is too easy you can challenge yourself. The second is customizability: You can choose your characters/skills/spells to fit with the play style you enjoy, and often the strategy involved (as I noted for FF12: Revenant Wings) is choosing what to bring into battle with you. I tend to make up for my failings in tactics with a decent strategy and some overwhelming force, but this game doesn’t provide that option.
The first half of the battles or so keep introducing new factors—using factories to make new units, anti-tank units, carriers, air units, naval units. The tutorial does a good job of explaining them as you go along. There are 26 “story” missions, plus free missions that unlock as you do the story, a free mode where you can customize the challenges, and a multiplayer mode.
The campaign mode has a plot that plays out in cutscenes between battles. The “days of ruin” refer to the post-apocalyptic setting of the game, when a world of mechanized factories and advanced science has been nearly destroyed by meteors and human survivors scramble for survival. There’s a “chapter ending” after mission #10 that wraps up most of the early plotlines; that’s where I stopped.
This is definitely a good stylus game. The series dates back to the NES, I believe, but I can’t imagine how slow it would be playing it crosskey-only. The play control in general is pretty good; my one compliant about pacing is watching the attacking animation for each unit over and over again.
It wasn’t really my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t call it a bad game by any means. If you like wargame strategy and tactics, you’d probably like it just fine.