Athena Crisis

This really is just like a browser/pc/mobile port of Advance Wars, minus the combat animations in favour of online and a faster experience. Despite its strong focus on online, it even has an offline mode, too! Not just campaign, but the ability to play without an internet connection, which is always a must in my book. My only qualm is that I can't download maps for local play to play them later, though I can make my own, and somewhat more egregious is that it doesn't have hotseat multiplayer on the same device. It seems to play PvP or co-op you need to play against someone who's also running the game, which is a bummer. But as someone who wanted to just play some Advance Wars against bots this game really scratches that itch, and the online functionality of immediately storing and loading your game across devices with no syncing is very, very nice.

Obviously it's based off of advance wars, but it actually has a lot of new features to offer.
- Infantry is much more varied. Snipers, flamethrowers, saboteurs, medics... there is a lot!
- Instead of picking a CO that has a power/super, you get to pick an ability from abilities that you unlock
- There are certain capture points where you can build new buildings, like barracks or factories. Also, there are a lot more buildings with more specialized purposes. In advance wars, you have a city, factory, airport, or seaport, all which give you funds. In Athena Crisis, houses/oil rigs provide income, while other building produce units. Then there are labs which boost stats.
- The tile sets are really beautiful! There are cute objects that seem to be placed on tiles, like shrines and other doodads.
- The music slaps harder than my father
I'm sure there is a lot more, but I'm only a few missions in. One downside is that the controls/menus are a bit janky. Nothing that is really frustrating or anything, just takes a bit getting used to.
Overall, its a cool little game if you want something similar to advance wars, but different enough to keep it interesting :)

I'm really impressed with this game for the amount of innovation it did on Advance Wars's formula. Other attempts to revive AW which I shall not name feel really shallow by comparison, since they tried to stick so close to the original unit balance, meanwhile Athena Crisis manages to keep things really fresh and exciting constantly throughout the campaign with its endless stream of new unit variants -- and it's not overwhelming since they're tied to Skills.
Also, adding Dark Souls-style invasions to a Turn-Based Strategy is one of the wildest gameplay decisions I've ever seen.

The control scheme specifically on steam deck is a very rough. The fact that you can't download the official campaign to play on the go seems like a big oversight. But the over all package is very good. Clean gameplay, async matchmaking, lots of variety and good balance. Also being able to play on mobile or pc seamlessly is VERY cool.

Note: disregard these steam hours, I have 100++ hours on browser (no good way to track, but its a lot)
TLDR: Best aw like I have seen, great campaign (well designed missions, nice writing, strongest ai I have seen so missions are not designed to be too lopsided against you but you spend the game abusing ai really hard). Excellent pvp (design, balance, features)- and I am someone who can judge these things (top awbw player SonjaTheSuperior). The invasion system is brilliant, basically allows any campaign map to turn into pvpve if the campaign player wants it to (basically, people can invade to help, hurt or take over ai players, up to a max of 8 total players). Got a ton of enjoyment out of it. If you want to see how it can look like:
Actual review:
So before I start the review I will say a bit about myself. I am a competitive awbw player (advance wars by web, going by the name "SonjaTheSuperior", ranked near at the high end and with some high finishes in division 1 tournaments) and a competitive wargroove player (wg1 and wg2) having played countless hours (>2000) between these. I have spent some large amount on athena crisis but no good way to measure it, since my playtime is on browser (like how I play awbw).
As a result I feel I have a good understanding of multiplayer pvp, balance and how game mechanics interact for these purposes for an AW-like game (given enough pvp experience against good players in a given aw like game, which I have in athena crisis).
With that as background, athena crisis surpasses advance wars in many ways, and is arguably better then it (but not in a strict sense, you can like the differences advance wars has). Athena crisis has the best unit balance I have seen (combined with a massive roster of units, easily surpassing any other game), best skill balance I have seen and overall is very well designed. There is an understanding there on what makes gameplay better and worse and this is executed at the level of core mechanics.
It is a very good pvp experience, and one can expect one's lobbies to be filled very fast if you make any. In fact if you want to join a lobby rather then create your own, you tend to need to have notifications on in the discord to catch them (people fill them that fast). If you want to play live matches then you will need to organize it via discord but this is understandable. Even a game like awbw has a hard time with live games, despite by far the largest pvp playerbase in the aw/ aw-like space.
Some other reviews have people complaining about certain units being overpowered (I have seen mentions of flamethrowers, super tanks etc.), I would respectfully say that these players have no clue what they are talking about (I would also challenge them to play against me and see how op these units are in practice). Super tanks are one of the weakest units in the game (but the skill that lets you build them is useful since the power is good), flamethrowers are good units but ultimately just glass cannons good for taking out infantry targets (while being one of the most expensive infantry units). Ultimately well balanced. Its also worth noting that the most basic and first skill you get (attack up) is one of the top skills, so new players in pvp are not at a disadvantage.
The campaign is very good. Story mostly takes a backseat to character development and the gameplay, but the writing is good. Missions are well designed, on relatively small maps so that it doesnt drag but big enough so there are a variety of set ups. The ai is easily the strongest in an aw-like, which means the dev doesnt need to throw the ai tons of resources in order to make it not a cakewalk. The ai is still abuseable but much less then any other. There is quite a bit of campaign content if that is relevant to you. There are also currently 6 curated (vetted) community campaigns and many more uncurated ones (with people also working on more), so there is plenty of campaign content if that what interests you. Having played through some, I can say they are high quality, usually falling short of the campaign made by the dev but not always (and one in particular has very strong writing).
The highlight for some people would be invasions. This allows the campaign player to turn almost any campaign map into pvpve, where players can join to help, hurt or take over an ai player. The cap is 8 and it creates significant chaos, watch some of the video I linked earlier (link:
Its also worth noting the community is very good and helpful, its a good idea to join the discord to interact, but of course you dont have to. This also helps with joining invasions, since the discord has a bot which indicates whenever an invasion has started.
Overall: fantastic game and incredible that it was done by just one dev. If I had to give a rating, it would be something like 9.8/10 or 10/10.

I'll start by saying this game is not Advance Wars, which should be obvious from it not being called Advance Wars, but muscle memory is a pain.
This is a well put together NOT-advance wars style game; it has a lot of really good pixel art, tons of unit variety and skills, multiple game modes, built in map editors, what seems like a Dark Souls invasion mechanic on a turn based strategy game, and more.
However, while a lot of the units are familiar, they mostly play very differently from its inspiration. This isn't a bad thing, as it keeps the game fresh and prevents it from being a weak clone. On the downside, this is also the same with its user interface.
Now, don't get me wrong, this is a competently made game and it works fine. That said, the lack of a "unit go back" button (that I can see at least, though the tutorial I did first didn't show one either) is frustrating as the option to undo an entire turn's worth of progress because you misclicked on the last unit... is painful.
The dialogue, while very much in good humour (the tutorial manages to be both funny and informative) is unskippable in bulk which for the longer maps you may have to redo can get a little grating. Additionally, while Advance Wars has always contained campaigns you go back to, the sheer difficulty scale of Athena Crisis coupled with its star system means you can accidentally cheat yourself out of stars by whatever means and then have to go through the entire campaign up to that point again multiple times. Bonus frustration if you were playing a secret level for which you have to go back and unlock it again too. I've had to take a break for now as, despite the quality of the game, I was finding my constant campaign restarts were driving me insane in chasing stars I missed at one point by destroying the last enemy unit a turn too early.
EDIT: the developer was nice enough to let me know that you CAN bulk skip dialogue (see comments for details) and levels can be selected for replaying after you beat a campaign. So... disregard that entire segment I guess!
To recap though, this is a very well made game that manages to distinguish itself from its inspiration despite taking on many of its better elements. It has a lot of options, some of which I haven't even got to yet, and has a lot of replayability. It is, however, lacking a few anti-frustration features (perhaps intentionally given a lot of the multiplayer content available, but still) that leave obsessive perfectionists like me on the verge of losing hair and/or monitors!
Definitely recommended, just don't be as crazy as me unless you're smarter than me!

uh, this game is cool...
but there should be a local multiplayer
it's a turn based strategy, so, why we can't play on 1 device?
or by steam remote to play??
Could be cool to see that.