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> Results: Advance Wars: Dual Strike
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Nintendo's handheld videogame systems are home to some of the best turn-based strategy games released in the last five years. Advance Wars has been one of the leaders of this genre's emergence as a gamer favorite and has even received both critical and financial success. It's no surprise then that Nintendo and Intelligent Systems have created a new entry in the series for Nintendo's still young dual screen handheld.
Advance Wars: Dual Strike adds some new things to the series but is mainly a small extension of the great Game Boy Advance games. The game can be played with either the stylus or the d-pad and buttons. The standard d-pad control is probably the most functional of the two although they're nearly equal as control schemes. This isn't a game that demands you use the stylus as primary control. However, the dual screens are a major part of gameplay. As the title suggests, battles can take place on both the top and bottom screens. You can take control of the top screen fights or leave them to your partner Commanding Officers (COs). If you're in a hurry, leaving the top screen to the AI is a fine way to play. But micromanagement fans will want to be in total control. The second screen also provides information that you needed to access through the various menus of the Game Boy Advance originals. It's definitely handy to only need to glance at the top screen for relevant info on units and terrain. It helps speed up play and in some of the larger scenarios this time savings is welcome. Scenarios feature land, sea or air units that you control. There is a rock, paper, scissors relationship between all the units in the game and exploiting these relationships is the key to victory. Often the game feels like one big puzzling chess match of strike and counter-strike based on various strengths and weaknesses. Your ability to use the maps to your advantage is also crucial to your success. What this game does so well, just like those that came before, is put you in total control of the battle while always laying everything you need to know right out there for proper decision making. It's powerfully entertaining to throw these forces against one another.  You can battle it out in a great campaign game that features a running storyline of the various good guys battling the Black Hole Army. The dialogue is entertaining and the characters all personable and unique. Nintendo's translation is of super high quality as always. If you're not into the story, there are plenty of other ways to play the game. Battle Maps are straight up one-map fights that play like a sort of skirmish mode against the AI. You conquer cities, produce troops and try to knock out your opponent's military. There's a new action game included too. Using a single stylus-directed unit at a time, you attempt to destroy all those of your opponent in real-time. This mode is more of a mini-game distraction than anything real meaty, but it's still kinda fun once in awhile. Survival is a nice twist on the Advance Wars formula where you have limited resources of some kind and must play through as many maps as possible. Finally, multiplayer is available on one DS, through download play with one chip or with two games and two DS units. There's just a pile of replayability in the game as long as you're enamored of the core concepts the game is built on. You can even make your own maps if the ones provided aren't enough! The key to this series' success is the streamlined strategy that you can play in bite-size chunks anytime or anywhere. The Nintendo DS doesn't add anything really groundbreaking to the series, but all the enhancements are welcome, however slight. The game was designed completely around portability with the ability to just save and quit at nearly any point during play. What's cool is you can hop right back in a day or a week or a month later and it's like you never stopped. The core gameplay is just so entertaining that you keep coming back to it over and over again too. If you have a friend to play multiplayer with you, that really makes the game diabolical as a time sink. Advance Wars: Dual Strike probably isn't a game that demands you buy a Nintendo DS just to play it, but if you have one, you'd be crazy not to own it. Here's hoping this series continues for a long, long time.  
This is the perfect type of strategy game to introduce kids to the genre. It's simple, plays fast and has a lot of really great characters for them to latch onto. It also ramps up the difficulty nice and slow so that kids can get a handle on core concepts and watch as they expand to much larger and more complex situations on bigger maps. The game is also colorful and whimsical so it basically can appeal to anyone despite the fact it features guns, tanks, bombers and battleships.
The subject matter is one of war and conflict so if the way Advance Wars sort of trivializes it bothers you, then it's probably best to skip it. The game shows war with no consequences and an absolutely cavalier attitude to just going out and fighting. Then again, it's all very much a cartoon war where you can just imagine the bad guys jumping out of their tanks as they're being destroyed as in the G.I. Joe cartoons of your youth. The game's setting is probably best described as a battle with army men in the backyard happening in your child's head. Even the dialogue is funny in a way kids could only make up as they go along. So while some might be a little offended, the ultimate spirit of fun and youth that pervades the entire game should allow just about anyone to take it lightly and just play along for the great gameplay found inside. Format For Printing | Tell A Friend | Digg | Slashdot | del.icio.us | Buy This Game Browse Amazon.com's selection of "Advance Wars" themed games Home > Review Archive > Video Games > Results: Advance Wars: Dual Strike |
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