First Impression

As someone with limited experience with the series, jumping into Adavance Wars felt daunt. Sure I was expecting a tough term based strategy game and that is exactly what I got. But it does a great job at introducing the new units and different types of terrain. The early missions would introduce a unit to me, explain its strengths and weaknesses, and then show me exactly how to use them, and I never felt overwhelmed thanks to the pace. I felt.

The game properly equipped me with the tool they needed in order to manage my squad, and I had a learning the intricacies of combat. At first I was rushing in head first, trying to destroy the enemy as quickly as possible. But the game taught me to take my time and that it's OK to sit back and take a defensive position sometimes, and I love the change of pace. Typically I'm pretty proactive in turn based strategy games, but Adavance Wars forced me to change my play style. The two major gameplay editions in fast forwarding gameplay and resetting a turn helped massively to make this a more streamlined experience for a new player. There are three main commanding officers in Adavance Wars one campaign, Andy, Max, and Sam. Each one comes packing its own advantages and disadvantages and their own CEO ability. Andy is an all rounder and A/C EO power heals his units whereas Max excels in head to head combat with his units dealing more damage.

Missions

Each mission has an assigned CEO and at different points you could choose between three missions, each one specific to the CEO. When it came to the abilities, I found Andy's healing pretty useless actually, and when given the option I always chose Max because his ability buffs the damage of the units and it's suited my place all better.

Adavance Wars One's mission structure is more basic than the second game, with most wind conditions being to kill all the enemy units or capture their main base. Although one of the more interesting ones of all having to capture a certain amount of bases before the enemy does. And those were my favorites as I had to map out the best strategy to take over the map, which made for a nice challenge while adding to the intensity. Some missions have set units, whereas others have bases that use to build units. And I much preferred to fix unit missions as they felt more deliberate, more like a chess match where some of the unit building base missions dragged on a bit too long because both the enemy and myself kept spawning new units rather than learning how to make the best of the units I was given.

Also, the final mission kind of came out of nowhere. And the game didn't prepare me well enough for it's more demanding nature. In this mission you can choose between all the CEO's and narratively it makes sense. But it feels like there should have been a few similar missions so you can get your feet wet before bombarding you with.

Campaign

Thankfully, the second game's campaign is much improved. First, you play as every CEO from the first game, which is amazing as I love the character. Even the new CEO's fits so well, especially the new CEO, Colin, who's a child in a commander's uniform, which I found hilarious.

On top of that, the mission structure is night and day different. You can still just capture the enemy base or destroy all of their units. There are other unique wind conditions too, like touching a base at the top of the map, using trees and fog of war to avoid cannons, or destroying A pipeline that was supplying the enemy's base. This was much needed, as otherwise the games felt pretty similar. There's one new unit, the Neo tank, that I honestly didn't use all too much.

And then the CEO's have a new Super CEO ability that is just a souped up version of their ability and takes longer to charge. My primary issue with the Second Games campaign are the villains. They weren't as interesting as the more diverse cast in the first game, and as a result I wasn't invested in the story the same way I was in Adavance Wars One. But the story isn't all too important, so it didn't detract too much.

Story

The story surprised me though, but Advance Wars One and Two have a colorful cast of characters, and if you told me these were all from some obscure Cartoon Network cartoon, I would believe you.

Typically on the type to skip dialogue and gun for the next mission, but in reboot camp I enjoyed the back and forth between all the CEOs and it's only bolstered by the absolutely stunning to the art that elevates the game. Just look at this intro cutscene, there is so much love poured into it. Now the voice acting left a bit to be desired. Some of the first lines are voice acted but then the rest of the dialogue isn't and I would have loved to see it fully voice acted because I put a nice bow on these already great characters.

Oh, I'm up. What's the drill this time? This package is undoubtedly a good value with two games for the price of 1, but playing both back-to-back as I did definitely exposed some weaknesses. Hands down. Adavance Wars Tools campaign is so much better. The mission structure made for a way more engaging and diverse experience, but on the other hand, there was only one new unit, and the only other editions are super CEO powers on the silos. So they felt very similar and I think playing both back-to-back was a bit too much due to their similarities.

The 1st, 10 or so missions of Advance War Two felt like a slog as the levels were comically easy in comparison to the ending of Adavance Wars One. On top of all that, you have to beat the campaign for Adavance War One to unlock the second game, so you can't just skip straight to the second. Outside of the campaigns there's a whole suite of stuff to do like a versus mode that gives you more maps to play on, either against your friends locally or the CPU.

Then there's the War Room, which has more missions where you battle against the CPU and try to get a high score. Next, the collection comes packing a multiplayer mode which lets you battle against your friends online. The best part is the map editor. Here you can create your own maps and share them with your friends, which of course will add so much content to this game. You could build maps for up to four players at once, and they could be as large as 30 by 15, which gives you loads of room to build. I messed around with this for a bit and it's well laid out and easy to use.

Even if I'm never really interested in making stuff in games myself. Unfortunately though, I haven't been able to test the online portion of this game, but by the looks of it, it seems to only work with your friends and has no matchmaking system, which is a shame. I doubt any of my friends will buy this game, so that means I won't be able to use the multiplayer, and I'd imagine that will be the same for many of you out there too. There's also a shop where you can buy maps and unlock CEO's for multiplayer and then goodies like concept art and music.

Conclusion

The game runs flawlessly and I didn't encounter a single bug or glitch which is always nicer. Report and as I already stated, the 2D art is absolutely stunning and I love it. However, the look at a map on in game models will be quite divisive. The models resemble toys and judging by how the maps look like game boards, it looks like the devs were going for this look. But I'm not a big fan of it. I would have preferred a more stylized cartoony aesthetic than the look that they went for in this game. However, the music, on the other hand, was brilliant. Each CEO has their own team and each one slaps, as the kids would say, especially grits. Just listen to this guitar. Well I wasn't a big fan of the in game models. The rest of the package looked and sounded so good as a collection.

There was so much content in Adavance Wars One and Two Reboot Camp. It brings 2 cult classics of the Switch with brand new graphics that I'm sure some people will love. The 2D art is gorgeous, the music has been stuck in my head since I started playing and of course the map editor and online multiplayer will add a lot of replayability. But I still would have liked to see an online matchmaking system for people like me who don't have friends who will buy this game. Despite having issues with some repetitive missions in the first game, I'm not liking the Villains in Adavance Wars Two. I walk away happy that I've finally given this Series A full look rather than just playing it at a friend's house when I was young. And as a result, I liked Adavance Wars One and Two Reboot Camp a lot.