I tried. I just can’t click with it. It doesn’t have what the other SRPGs I like have, like characters, variability that makes your run sort of personalized, or a story and world there with it. I feel as though I am solving developer puzzles rather than strategizing. Squads are faceless and I find myself unable to be attached to an army I can’t really tailor make. I think there’s something here for SOMEONE, but that someone just isn’t me.

I also think the models look really overly smooth and plasticy, and it doesn’t work. Characters themselves look good, BUT their models look rather v-tubery in dialogue and it’s a bit off putting when they’re not fully voiced. Character animations in battle are quite charming though, but there’s just not as much personality to the game beyond that for me. I also cannot stand the music. It is subjected to being a few bars I’ll remember in a derrogatory way. I gave the game a fair shake, got halfway through the first, and it’s just not for me. Tried my best but it’s not. If only it wasn’t delayed 18 months and I’d known that in November 2021.

This game is a fantastic update to a classic strategy game. Being able to make new maps is such a great choice. I think not doing a lot to the main formula really helped.

The AI can be a pain in the ass sometimes, being borderline unrelenting. And my other complaint is the voice acting. Arin Hanson is an acceptable VA, but he did absolutely nothing for Max. Like if you're gonna provide voices to these iconic characters for the first time, it really needs to be larger than life.

But if you like strategy games this is a good way to go.

I was excited for this game back in it was announced back in 2021 enjoying the 1st game & Dual Strike however I know we had to wait for a while due to delays. Thankfully it was released & it was an absolute blast to play being pretty faithful to the original AW with some quality of life improvements like cutting down the tutorials & the ability to redo your turn if you accidently messed up. I never played AW2 beforehand it was still just as good if not slightly better than the original.

Its a fun turn based strategy game that mostly is a test of skill & managing your funding & units that gets challenging even with the new casual mode. They were a couple of missions I'm not a fan of like fog of war ones & the final mission in AW2 with the latter being frustrating but overall the campaigns were fun. It has a lot of content with the 2 campaigns, the war room challenges, multiplayer which I will play eventually with my younger brother as well creating your own maps. I'm so glad to play this series again & hopefully we see more of it in the future.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp brings back the successful mechanics of the Game Boy Advance era, but its overall experience feels somewhat outdated. While the graphics have been improved, the gameplay remains unchanged, failing to keep up with industry advancements.

In my opinion, the new cartoonish design doesn't fit well with the wargame theme, and the plot lacks depth, following the clichéd formula of a villain's world conquest. For some reason, the mysterious aura and intriguing lore that the originals had are absent here.

The addictive gameplay and enigmatic qualities of the GBA games held a special allure, hinting at a deeper narrative beyond the game itself. Unfortunately, Re-Boot Camp fails to recapture that essence.

The game offers a nostalgic return to fans seeking a trip down memory lane, but fails to recapture the magic that made the original games so captivating.

It was fun to return to this franchise that I liked for a moment as a kid, but it does not reach the same peaks that I took away from it during that time.

The artstyle is very cool and nice and does well with bringing to life the playstyle I remember. It doesn't touch the gameplay formula one bit.

And that is sadly a potential shortcoming, as Advance Wars Re-Boot Camp feels outdated outside the visuals. It could have benefited from a "rewind action" button compared to redoing the entire turn option that's present in the game. It could have benefitted with some modern tweaks or new additions. The gameplay also had weird spikes in difficulty that went from very easy to all of the sudden punishing.

If you were looking to experience nostalgia and relive the advance wars experience, this should be a fun time for you. If you're looking for something different within the stradegy RPG realm, maybe not.

This game is a product with every detail taken care of, a full-blown remake that preserves what was good in the original products and makes them palatable to new generations as well thanks to a series of shrewdness and improvements to the user experience. Whether you're looking for a hit-and-run strategy game that introduces you to the genre or one that is soft only on the surface but capable of making you work up a sweat, here you will find plenty of content and gameplay that is as punctual as a Swiss watch, making balance and plurality of approaches some of its cornerstones.

A remake of a strategy masterpiece that doesn't quite nail the presentation. The toy soldier aesthetic is nowhere near as charming as the original retro pixel art, though I guess it does make the game look newer (even if it looks like a mobile game). The character art is hit or miss with some designs looking too simplified while others are genuine improvements.

There's also limited voice acting, but this aspect of the presentation also falls flat. Most characters are only voiced for the occasional sentence and a few grunts. And the character castings and performances are hit and miss too.

The new music, on the other hand, is fantastic! The original's soundtrack was held back by the GBA's sound capabilities, so the upgrade was much needed. Shoutout to Sensei's Power theme in particular, that track rocks.

There's also HD rumble whenever you move your cursor or a tank moves on the map. Of all the things to focus on in a remake I don't know why they chose this, but strangely it's a good addition? It makes the game feel good to play for some reason.

I didn't use the online multiplayer because there's no random matchmaking and I don't know anyone else who owns a copy of this game. Why would I? It's an extremely niche strategy game that Nintendo went out of it's way to make sure nobody bought. Nintendo really set up this game and franchise to fail by delaying this game for 2 years.

Overall I love Advance Wars, and while I think the developers do too, the final product wasn't the slam dunk it could have been. I'd give this game a lower score than the original advance wars games due to the presentation (it still gets 4 stars for being Advance Wars). But it's still nice having these two games widely available and also be on the same cartridge.

My well written review got eaten so quick summary of thoughts:

-nostalgia bit me here
-fire emblem works because of the characters AND gameplay
-the look is less edgy(though still bright) than the original, smoothed out in 3D
-difficulty is all over the place
-feels like you solve dev strategy puzzles vs actually strategizing
-goofy(but not goofy enough)meaningless war is a bad plot
-its fine but I'm not going to waste more time on it.
-slow as hell, lots of waiting and huge time sink when you lose especially.

It's pretty much the exact same game as the originals, but they're so good do you really need more?

Its main additions are better quality of life for the first game (cutting down the 15 mission tutorial to just 3 missions and 3 short early Campaign levels, letting you choose COs for the final battle, the AI not cheating in Fog, the scoring system being in-line with 2 and beyond. And removing the dumb self-insert character) and the incredibly expressive CO Power animations and music. The common trend I see is "WayForward did not need to go this hard."

I'm glad this game is giving the franchise another chance at life, and I hope that leads somewhere.

Two of the best platform-signifying games of the Game Boy Advance, are still two of the best strategy games yet made, with Intelligent Systems’ charming sprite-work cartoonized by WayForward.

Several Quality of Life changes make this an essential try even for series veterans. That enough has been changed, points to everything that has not been changed, and even new changes which newly get in the way. Some of the new unit visuals, which change based on faction, are hard to tell from other units, now, and the overall refresh to the style, while initially pleasing, is not as form-fitting for the grid-based movement and precision of the first two Advance Wars.

There are other caveats which are regular Nintendo caveats: there is multiplayer if you connect directly with a friend, but no open online lobbies or public play. There is a map creator but the sharing is even more limited than Mario Maker, you can only send your creations to a friend who plays the game (for me, one person), so that’s a creative dead-end for what remains a pretty clean-cut mapmaker (but still limited to one size, odd).

There are baked in things, that feel more urgent to address now. The animations for CO Powers, in particular, are very long. Some in-game days you’ll see as many as three powers, meaning you’re watching long cutscene animations you’ve seen many times and when you progress with more troops, those times get longer, as it must touch every unit the power has influenced. There are filters for other game-specific animations like capturing and watching the battles, so it’s hard to imagine this did not especially occur to anyone while reimplementing those.

What the style does do is scale pretty well and allow a more readable format that can now be zoomed way out using the stick. Good. There are also changes to scoring, making S-ranks relatively easy, and even some formal changes to how certain battles progress, specifically changing many of the fastest routed strategies you may be able to look up for some levels.

While on the whole it felt significantly easier, whether by age and growing a big brain or because they’ve really made certain missions more accessible… There is one mission that took me about six of my 55 hours to complete, which is an absurdity, when everything else was cleared in a few tries. There is maybe some imbalance and someone else may get hooked up somewhere else. I do feel some of the instinctive changes are not considered whole cloth for how they change the course of a battle.

This is a terrific value and two of the best games. Given the extra year of development due to ongoing conflicts in Ukraine, it’s a major downer every rough edge wasn’t smoothed out, all the options expanded, and online worked on. There could be the definitive Advance Wars here, but you cannot really say that for either version, and this far on, you still need to play those original games — and if you love them — only then do you need to play these games.

Two full games in one is quite the value. It takes the old advance wars and makes them playable in 2023 which in and of itself is a joy and allows people entry into this classic strategy game.

Most of my problems come with the repetitiveness of missions across games. They mostly amount to the same core group of strategies you can use to out-match your enemy. Failure state for me was rather rare. Lots of downtime watching your enemies move/attack.

It's also weird that like, Orange Star is just casually going to war with all of these people. It really does feel like you're playing the bad guys in the first game.

Japanese Game Company manages to remake better version of Chess.

Not a fan of Olaf's american accent, but Andy being Ash Ketchum and Max being Arin from Game Grumps more than make up for it.

However, considering that you can get the original games off the internet for free, I really couldn't recommend buying this unless you properly love Advance Wars.

I was pleasantly surprised by this one. I was expecting to maybe get a few hours out of it and then fall off it, but the campaigns retain their intoxicating addictiveness from the GBA days and were a joy to play through.

I'm not a fan of the unit visuals but after a few hours you stop noticing them as you're so focused on actually playing the maps. The rest of the visuals I actually thought were quite nice and well polished. The story is... well, almost non-existent - if you're expecting this to be "Fire Emblem with tanks" then you'll be disappointed. The characters are one-note but do their job of being likeable and cool. The updated music is fantastic re -imaginings of the original tunes (Sensei's theme a particular standout) - the music was a highlight of the originals and I'm so glad that they nailed it here.

There is also just a ton of content. I got around 50 hours out of the game with the two campaigns, and then there are bonus War Room maps and the challenge level campaigns if I want to hop back in later. The online is pretty lackluster so if you're looking for a mutiplayer experience then you'll want to look elsewhere.

Overall if you're looking for raw single-player strategic fun then I don't think you can go wrong with this version.