Wargroove

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Mostly just played the campaign but there's multiplayer too. Had a blast with the campaign wasn't a fan of the last couple missions however not a big fan when a strategy game becomes a really slow game of inches. But other than that Wargroove was a faithful adaptation of Advance Wars. The story was simple and fun and Caesar is the bestest ever! Looking forward to playing the sequel

Not a bad game and somewhat scratches the Advance Wars itch but is inferior in pretty much every way.