Wargroove

This is a bit of a mixed review. If you're looking for a score right off the bat, I'd give it like a 6/10. Buy it in a sale.
Now, let me start off by saying, I am not good at tactics games. I don't pretend to be. I play them for the animations, and it's satisfying to kill enemy units.
Wargroove is a bit like Advance Wars - from what I hear, never played it - in that it's armies fighting each other, rather than individual characters. You still have individual character, but they're not really anything special.
This is a good thing in one way for me, as I'm terrified of perma death.
However, there's also the rather major downside that you're not really attached to any of your units. Swordsman McGee the First is no more of a character than the Knight you recruited five turns into the level.
The commanders are no better, having a minimum of dialogue, and being the most bog standard boring character archetypes. The story is an excuse for the game to take place, nothing more.
The soundtrack is entirely forgettable. Never obnoxious, but I won't find myself humming a single track. The art style is decently charming, and the animations were serviceable. Some of them added in a decent bit of character, but you'll be seeing so much of them that you'll quickly be bored.
So, let's get on to the actual gameplay then, shall we?
There, I have the problem that the design of the game kind of contradicts itself. Because everyone is just a nameless goon, you'd expect the game to encourage you to play aggressive and recklessly, but there are a number of mechanics that go against that.
In most levels, you start with less villages (which provide you with the income you need to recruit troops) than your opponent. Not only that, often there is the baffling design in a lot of maps that none of your starting units will be able to capture a village on turn one, while the opponent can, leading to not just a higher starting income for them, but a snowballing effect as well.
But the real issue comes from the combat.
Some troop types deal more damage to other troop types. That makes sense. A pikemen unit should probably deal more damage to a cavalry unit than a swordsmen unit. However, it's to an almost insane degree. Particularly because of the following.
The damage your units deal is proportional to their remaining HP. Which means that there is an absolutely massive first movers advantage. Your full health pikemen might deal something like 80% of a knight's HP if they attack first, but if the reverse is true, they might lose half their HP already, meaning that they'll only damage 40% of the knight's HP.
On its own, that's not a problem. But since the enemy has a stronger economy than you, they'll send more units than you can counter. Especially because a lot of levels only give you access to one easy barracks, and by the time you've captured a second, the game is functionally over already.
Units also don't heal by themselves, and the options for healing (villages or alchemists) cost money. More money than these units are usually worth. I think I can count the amount of times I used these heals (outside of no-build missions) on one hand. Which means that, once a unit is damaged enough, it becomes basically worthless, outside of blocking movement.
The solution? Chokepoints and ranged units. Because they're the only ones who can reliably provide more value than their cost - at least until you unlock flying units (more on that later).
I like that playstyle, and in some levels, it shines. But most of your units are way too slow to get to the reasonable chokepoints in time, and even if they do get there, they'll just die without doing anything anyway.
Your commander should be the answer to this, being obscenely powerful, capable of soloing low tier units with ease, and being the only units to regenerate HP automatically, if I'm not mistaken. But you lose when they die, and the enemy has a lot more units than you can handle.
How do you actually win then? Roll in the Wagon. A unit meant for transporting other land units with low movement, but it's actually quite broken. It has an insane movement range, being able to reach nearly any chokepoint in one turn, because most are on or next to roads. It's only 50 gold more expensive than a pikemen, and most surprisingly, it's actually tankier too. Especially because the AI loves to attack it with worthless units of their own, clogging up the actual valuable tiles.
Combine the Wagon with the Trebuchet, a very expensive ranged unit, capable of lowering most units to such an HP where they are genuinely a detriment to the AI, just taking up space that could be inhabitated by other units. They have pretty good movement on roads. So not only are they faster than your other units, they also actually kill units, all while staying out of range of enemy counterattacks.
Because they're so expensive, this lead to every game roughly playing out the same. A starting landgrab, into my first trebuchet, then wagons as necessary, until I could get more trebuchets, and slowly inch my way forward.
This all worked rather well, until the introduction of flying units, which should be a counter to the Trebuchet, but you also get access to the Ballista, which is an anti-flying Trebuchet, so it doesn't matter.
That changes when you can recruit flying units however, because they are absolutely broken.
They don't get counterattacked by other units, with some exceptions. These counter units can usually kill your flying unit outright. So your just add in one or two of these units at the start to counter the enemy flying units, and then spam out as many flying units as you can. You just ignore villages, and eventually hunt down their commander - who also can't fight back. The AI is incapable of dealing with flying units effectively, because the counter units they do make can be easily manoeuvred around, since flying units have a lot more mobility than the vast majority of units, so you'll get tons of free kills.
All these issues combined to make a lot of maps just feel incredibly samey, with no changes to my gameplan. Eventually I just turned down the difficulty modifiers to allow me through breeze through the maps. Which, graciously, the game does allow you to tune three things individually, those being income, damage taken, and groove charge (your commanders special ability).
There was one particular map which I would say was the highlight of the game for me. You had a base and some villager units, and you had to defend them from waves of bandits. Not exactly a novel concept, but I think it made the game so much more fun to have a predetermined amount of enemies, with no enemy economy to speak of. It was by far the best experience I had with the game.
My problems are likely based on my skill level and my style of play. I won't dispute that. But I'd probably have put it down two or so missions after I unlocked trebuchets if I was only thinking of how enjoyable the game was in the moment.
That's all the story mode. I've played one game of multiplayer against my girlfriend, which wasn't particularly exciting, and one of the 'puzzle' missions, which was actually quite nice! The game also seems to have a rather robust level editor, if that's your kind of thing. In general, I wouldn't say that the game is lacking in content, rather, it's lacking in enough difference between that content.
It's not a horrible experience by any means, but all the design decisions came together to make the game a slog to get through in a lot of levels. I wouldn't get it full price, but if it was €10 or less, sure, pick it up. Just don't be afraid to put it back down if it stops being fun. This is not a game that you absolutely need to finish to get the most out of it. In fact, I'd say it's best enjoyed by quitting halfway through.
PS: Works well on Steam Deck.

This is a great successor to games like Advanced Wars. I would recommend it to anyone who likes strategy games.

I have YET to finish the story. I'm so addicted to the mods and survival modes that I've relaxed with those to learn and work the mechanics while not doing much of anything else. So when it's been 87 hours, it's not about competitive. It's not about the story, which I still want to complete. Heck, I still use the arcade mode to learn the commanders. But the mods and other aspects continue to breath life even if it's so long after launch.

The first 85% of the campaign was pretty good. I couldn't bring myself to finish the game however, as the last few missions were too much of a slog for me. Having to worry about ground, air, and navy, while having to micro manage so many different types of units - just too exhausting. Still, I had fun until the end.
8/10.

Great game. The latter part of it gets a bit tiring and repetitive, but that is the genre and game. Pacing was kinda messed up if you failed later in the game.
Later in game the session length is very long and messing up cost you so much time in redoing the mission. I would have loved a quick save or undo button, just because set up isn't that interesting or fast.
Also in relation to repeating missions, I really hate the repeated chats/dialogue of the characters. I already read it please skip anything that isn't like a signal of something that will happening in combat or maybe just give the character icon a visual queue rather than making me click through dialogue again.
And I Also had issues with the new terrain units in Act 5(after Heavensong). I didn't particularly like it or maybe the balancing was weird. It puts you in a low economy situation with new pieces, which to me felt like a very steep curve to be dunked in. I got it, but it felt like there could have been some setup to the pieces, but maybe that would have messed up the pacing in a different way,

The fun and nice story kept me entertained throughout the game.
However, I didn't play through it, as it gets tiring to move all the many units piece by piece in later missions and to do the whole lengthy beginning of a mission again if you fail.

(DE:
Die spaßige und nette Story hat mich die Spielzeit über gut unterhalten.
Ich habe es aber nicht durchgespielt, da es ermüdend wird bei späteren Missionen die ganzen vielen Einheiten Stück für Stück zu bewegen und bei Scheitern nochmal den ganzen langwierigen Anfang einer Mission zu erledigen.)

at its core, wargroove is a decent strategy game. strongly inspired by advance wars (and SRPGs at large), you get the classics like weaknesses and resistances, chokepoint management, etc. on top of that, you get the mechanics inspired from advance wars : COs with their own powers, building capture, unit spawning mid-battle and so on.
with that solid foundation, wargroove also has some pretty decent pixel visuals to go with it. the soundtrack is equally pleasant and a good companion throughout the game. unfortunately, the story is nothing to write home about. not *terrible*, but unremarkable for sure.
however, even considering the above, wargroove's campaign - the main attraction of any SRPG - is a chore to get through. this is something i can fully fault wargroove for, because a lot of SRPGs struggle with this, but the main problem is the maps are too big. most units barely have any movement range or when they do, that usually comes with massive caveats. for instance, flying units move fast and over terrain, but are still rather frail! siege units do a lot of damage but cannot attack the same turn they move!
unless you turn down the difficulty, no specific unit will carry you through the game or make up for the large maps. this makes sense, classic SRPG fare, even advance wars didn't do that! you have to consider units strengths and weaknesses! but the charm of advance wars was also that unless you were in some ultra late campaign maps, the size was reasonable, so the pace and length of battles felt much better. this coupled with the fact that you can get maps where units spawn a *massive* amount of units, whether naturally or through reinforcements, means that maps become a slog quickly.
i got halfway through the game and i did not want to play more. it also doesn't help that it feels like every campaign map is meant to be played a certain way, rather than letting you coast along and figure it out yourself.
i realize that this sounds overly negative, but if you are the kind of person that likes when games take a long time to figure out each map, or you like to crank up the difficulty, this is more than up your alley. that combined with the new free co-op campaign they added after release, the trove of custom content players have made and the online multiplayer makes it more than worth it. i just could not personally stomach to finish the whole campaign.