Wargroove

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

I like this game a lot but good LORD does it piss me off.
To list off everything I like about the game:
- The art style is neat.
- I've never played Advance Wars but from what I can see this is very similar, so if you like Advance Wars this is a good pick for you.
- When you get deep into a level you get really into it mentally and it's a ton of fun.
- The music is good.
- The story is relatively little and therefore doesn't get in the way of the gameplay. It also isn't *entirely* without substance, and it is interesting enough if you choose to follow it.
- The different types of units and various commanders are fun to interact with.
- There's the ability to create entire custom levels and campaigns which is really cool. You can even make custom cutscenes that can be exactly like the ones in the base game.
- You can customize the difficulty of the game, so if there's a BS level that you hate, (Act 6, Mission 3. That level canonically takes place on September 11th and it lives up to that by being an utter tragedy of a level that I could write an entire essay on the blithering, farcically breathtaking inanity of.) you can effectively skip it by lowering the difficulty and cheesing it. Doing this still wastes a lot of your time, though, and it also just feels super disrespectful to the game so I don't ever touch it (except for that terrorist attack of a level I mentioned earlier).
That stuff is all well and good, but I have gotta complain about some of the things in this game that just grind my gears to no end.
First off, there is some serious QoL issues with this game. A single level can easily take one or even multiple hours. If I'm going to put that much time on the line, there had better be features to make sure I don't get screwed over by something out of my control. That's where these issues come in.
- There is absolutely NO way whatsoever by which you can undo a move or restart your turn. Even if you move a unit and don't attack or interact with anything, you cannot undo your move. This PISSES ME OFF. If I make a misinput and put a unit one square off of where I wanted to move it, I guess I just lose and get set back 45 minutes of my life. I would understand not letting me undo an attacking move on any unit or structure, no ability to undo anything whatsoever? Technically I guess there is this really, really antiquated checkpoint system that you can use to save your progress in a match. If you end up losing you can restart from there, but you first of all: have to remember to set that checkpoint every turn if you don't want to risk losing hours of your time; and second of all: you have to remember that when you set a checkpoint, all moves you have already made in that turn will have been made when you load the checkpoint. Did you make a bad move and want to restart your turn? Nah. You have to start your 2 hour battle over again from the beginning, because people DEFINITELY have time for that.
- This next thing is even worse: The game outright lies to you in regard to damage numbers. The way the health for units, structures and commanders works in this game is that it is based on a percent system. There are times, though, where the game will tell you an attack will deal 100% to an enemy and then it simply *doesn't*. You mean to tell me that in a game where my tactical decisions really matter and should be what decides if I win or lose, the UI can just decide to give me false information? It turns out that there is a randomness involved with how much damage attacks do. Similar to pokemon, there are damage "rolls" that mean that an attack can do any amount of damage within a small range. The issue is that the game NEVER TELLS YOU THIS. You just have to get screwed over, wonder why, look in your settings and see that there is a setting to display damage ranges. Why isn't that on by default!? Did they think it would be too complex for our pea-brains to comprehend? So you really believe, devs, that I would prefer to get ♥♥♥♥♥♥ by my own user interface giving me FALSE INFORMATION than have to look at more than one number at a time when hovering over an attacking move? Like genuinely!? This can straight up lose you games, so the fact that the game does nothing to tell you about it is preposterous.
- I hated the handholding that took place at the beginning of the game. Jejune tutorial dialogue that taught me such complexities as how to press the B button. Would be nice if you taught me ANYTHING ABOUT DAMAGE RANGE. Infantile tutorials such as this have been hackneyed since well before this game came out in 2019.
- Enemy movement range is obnoxious to monitor. You cannot show multiple enemy's attack ranges at once. You can't even move your cursor or the camera while viewing an enemy's attack range. You have to hold the button down on the enemy to see where they can reach. Also, I swear it sometimes shows false information just like the damage indication, especially for naval units. Sometimes an enemy turtle will move one square further than it should have been able to according to my UI even though I made no movements that could alter the turtle's path in any way.
Overall, I like this game a lot. It's very satisfying to clear levels. I like the artstyle and animation style. The combat animations are neat to look at even though you usually skip them because you initiate combat thousands of times over the course of the game. But goodness gracious, this game has made me ragequit out of a session like three times. It would be one thing if I simply approached a level incorrectly or made bad decisions— I could live with being punished for that— but getting overly punished for misinputs or mechanics that the game doesn't tell me about whatsoever is another thing entirely. When I lose, I want it to be my mistake, not a result of obfuscation from the game. And I don't want the game to waste hours of my time even though there is a feature that seems to attempt to prevent that from happening. The checkpoint feature needed to be better than it is, or there simply needed to be a way to undo your move or restart your turn.
This is one of those games where I wish there was a neutral rating on Steam, *in betwixt* recommendation and not-recommendation. In the absence of any intermediate option, I will choose to recommend Wargroove. Were I ever to recommend this game to someone, though, it wouldn't be without salient forewarning of the game's iniquities.

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.

a truly fine "Advance Wars" clone. very welcome to see on PC, and it really works nicely.

however it's plagued by a disease like so, so many games these days: a sense of humor. or "humor". like many / most devs, these talented designers thought their writing was absolute gold, so injected their game full of it. problem is, it's not a comedy point-and-click adventure, it's a simple and straight-forward Advanced Wars tactical game. so when you want to be strategizing, first the characters want to banter for a while. a long while. be prepared to mash buttons before every attempt at a challenge map, for example ... even a retry on a skirmish gets you 10+ dialogue balloons you've got to skip through to get to the reason you're there. campaign dialogue seems mostly skippable by holding a button, but the scenario maps? no such luck. it's a bizarre problem you really do see again and again on indie games lately. they all have hilarious jokes, and the player's just GOT to experience all of them, even on retry. sigh!

but the game itself's really nice. it's Advanced Wars, only fantasy. the art's solid and music just fine. a really very acceptable PC substitute for Adanced Wars 1 and 2 and I wish there we more games like it. if you're a fan of those titles, this is the one to get. my problem with the endless comedy bits notwithstanding. I'll get over it.

I’ve never played Advanced Wars, but I’ve seen a few negative comparisons between it and Wargroove. As much as I’m skeptical of the nostalgic tint to the comparative praise for Advance Wars, just looking at a longplay I can see a few things in its favor. Its peppier soundtrack is far more enjoyable, even in the GBA soundfont, and the speed of play feels quicker and smoother than Wargroove, which often begs you to use the fast-forward/skip button. I also didn’t get a feel for Advanced Wars’ story, but Wargroove just isn’t compelling. Meet a bunch of characters from a bunch of different countries, bring them together, stop the big evil. That’s pretty much it. You might get a bit more out of these characters if you play the side missions or the arcade mode, but I just find the writing to be too paint-by-numbers.
I wouldn’t count out Wargroove, though. The pixel graphics are appealing, even if the portraits look kind of funky (those noses, ugh). The sprite animation contributes a bit to the speed of play issue I mentioned, but it looks and feels good. I prefer to move the battles along, but I can’t help but stop every so often to watch a trebuchet or dragon blast away another unit at full health, or to watch a commander deliver a retaliation killshot.
I also really like the health mechanics. Health contributes to attack power, so you don’t have to kill a unit to neutralize their threat. Retaliatory strikes give you pause to consider whether you’re making the best use of your units. At the same time, bases also have health that need to be guarded, but can also be redistributed to units. Capturing a town just to have it torn down again might be frustrating for some, but for me, I understand that I need control of the area. I’m also depriving the opponent of another move with one of their units, if they want to clear/recapture it. There are a lot of options, and it looks way better than the squatting you appear to need to do in Advance Wars, but again, I can’t speak to how AW feels in practice.
Some battles get a bit busy and frustrating. I sometimes wish there was a movement heat map so that I didn’t have to count how many enemy units can reach one square. The majority of my resets were from letting my commander get ganged up on rather than the actual tide of battle. I also don’t like how any unused unit or barracks will prevent the turn from ending automatically. It can be hard to spot unused units, but even if I’ve used every unit and can’t afford to recruit anything, I still have to end the turn manually if the barracks haven’t recruited a unit that turn. Finally, the last level of the main game is pretty annoying. You can’t let a single unit die, and it took me several retries over a few hours to clear. The map is so small, yet it feels like such a slog until you’ve finally threaded the needle.
Wargroove isn’t perfect. There are several things which I would hope have been improved in the sequel. Still, the battles are more fun than a bore, and there are plenty of engaging game modes for singleplayer and multiplayer experiences.

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.

It's flipping great.
Scratches that itch that no advance wars successor did so far.