Wargroove

This review is right on the edge between positive and negative. Wargroove does a lot of things very well, but the last two missions in the campaign were very bad, and soured my opinion of the game as a whole.
What is it?
Wargroove is a turn-based, tactical strategy game, heavily inspired by the Advance Wars series on the GBA and Nintendo DS. Battles typically involve one or more armies, each with a headquarters, a powerful commander unit, troops, and buildings like barracks where you can spend gold to produce troops. On a player's turn, each unit can move and take an action (usually attacking an enemy unit or building). On offense, a unit attacks first, then takes counterattack damage from the enemy unit. Damage dealt is proportional to the health of the attacking unit (a unit at 100% health deals much more than a unit at 10% health), which means that a lot of the strategy involves getting the first strike, in order to cripple your enemy's ability to counterattack. A team wins by either defeating their opponent's commander or destroying their headquarters.
The Good:
Wargroove does an excellent job of capturing the spirit of 2000s handheld turn based tactical games like Advance Wars. The spritework and visuals are excellent. While the writing and voice acting doesn't really work for me as an adult, It feels like an intentional attempt to faithfully capture the tone and maturity level of GBA Advance Wars / Fire Emblem / etc. The game also has a considerable amount of content, between a fairly lengthy campaign, a long list of (surprisingly complicated) puzzles, and an arcade mode. Ultimately if you have nostalgia for Advance Wars, you'll probably like this game, which is why I give it a positive review.
The Mediocre:
These type of games can often feel quite slow, which is not a problem for everyone, but can be annoying to some players, and can be really annoying if missions are designed poorly.
Basically because getting the first strike is so valuable (and getting hit by the first strike is so disastrous) it is fairly hard to push forward aggressively. Often the best strategy vs the AI in the campaign is to move your units right up to the edge of the opponent's attack range, so that they can't attack you, but if they try to move forward you can attack them. As a result, lots of missions involve a very slow and methodical push. Most missions are won by slowly developing control over the map and developing total unit superiority (e.g., you have 20 units, your enemy only has 5) before pushing in to win.
The end result is that you can "win" many missions by turn 6 or so (in that, if you continue to play adequately you will almost certainly win), but you can't actually end the mission until turn 16-20, so it often feels like you are just "going through the motions" until the level ends.
Another strange decision was introducing the water units so late into the game. Some of the best missions were the ones where I had access to land, sea, and air units, because that's when the strategy of the game is at its best. It was interesting to, e.g., play a more guerrilla style land game against my opponent's superior land forces while I developed ocean superiority, knowing that I could eventually win the land game with the aid of long range warships. When the game is just ground units (or even ground and air), many of those strategic decisions don't exist. But because they introduce ships so late into the game, there are only like 3 or 4 missions where it really feels I was getting the whole experience.
The Bad:
Far too many of the campaign missions involve no production buildings (barracks, sea ports, air unit producers), and just involve the player pushing a clump of units against an enemy with horrible AI but a much much larger set of units. These missions are extremely tedious, because the gameplay devolves into checking your opponent's movement and attack ranges and slowly pushing right to the edge of those ranges, trying to minimize the damage your army takes because you have no way to reinforce and have limited healing. They generally play out like a much worse version of Fire Emblem.
There is maybe one or two of these that were legitimately interesting, but most of them were just slogs. I think it would be OK if they were side missions, but several of them are mandatory missions. Even worse, for whatever reason, the final mission and the epilogue mission are both the most egregious examples of this type of gameplay. I met the conditions for unlocking the epilogue mission, saw the starting unit positions, then quit the game without even attempting it. It's maybe the least interesting final stretch in any game I've ever played.
If any developer reads this, please don't put these kind of levels in the sequel, or at the very least, keep them as shorter side missions.
TL;DR:
Overall a good, lovingly-crafted AdvanceWars-esque game with some horribly unsatisfying campaign levels, particularly at the end of the game.

Very underrated game! I don't think people give it a fair shake. The whole game feels like playing a bit of chess with some puzzle-solving (i.e., what order to use units in, where to position who first, how to set up critical hits on enemies and whatnot) which I personally find to be challenging enough that my brain is engaged but not overwhelmed. I am not into turn-based strategy games at ALL, mostly because I don't have the patience for them or the attention span to manage a ton of things, so I was surprised to find I enjoyed Wargroove. Never played Advance Wars/Fire Emblem/etc, so I have no point of comparison and can only judge the game as is. I am also reviewing as someone who has only played all the vanilla non-multiplayer modes besides the co-op campaign.
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If this game needs a disclaimer, it's that it's slow-going. Make that VERY slow-going. I can see how the pace would drive lots of people crazy, especially if they are more used to or prefer faster paced RTS games.
I notice a lot of negative reviews seem written by people who likely have not played past the tutorial missions (which admittedly cover roughly Act 1, 2, and maybe a mission's worth into Act 3), given the time at review. There does feel like a little too much hand-holding in the early acts, which definitely can be frustrating given how long missions/dialogue can go and probably contributes to some people being discouraged early. I know I personally wanted to hurl my Deck AND burn my computer when I could not quickly get Emeric and Mercia to stfu about stuff like LOOKING AT THE CODEX/DAMAGE MATRIX FOR EVERY UNIT, EXAMINING THE MOVEMENT RANGE FOR UNITS, RECRUITING FROM AND CAPTURING BUILDINGS, and BLAH BLAH BLAH. I totally get it, but I hung in there to see what else the game could offer and I am glad I did.
The singleplayer campaign has a very straightforward plot that kept me entertained enough--I did not expect some grand story and you shouldn't either--and it also comes with a sprinkle of brief diversions for laughs like the dog commander Caesar vs. outlaws side quests and barely-qualifies-as-side-plot missions that cover secondary character interactions/dynamics like Tenri vs. Emeric, Greenfinger vs. Sedge, etc. I agree with assessments that the campaign missions can feel they're plodding along, and god forbid you need to replay a mission and just want to get a move on... by far the most annoying thing for me was the fact that you apparently cannot fully skip sections of the in-map dialogue (NOT the animated cutscenes, which can mercifully be skipped by holding down a button) short of mashing a button to speed up the text which is still very annoying. Don't get me started on BACKTRACKING on the SP map either: if you want to backtrack more than a handful of missions, you will be subjected to watching your little group go through EVERY PREVIOUS MAIN MISSION ON THE MAP. This can be sped up by holding a button but is a really bizarre inconvenience if you've completed the campaign and maybe want to try going back and 3-starring or S-ranking missions from the beginning or something.
The co-op campaign is non-linear compared to the SP campaign and honestly a lot more fun despite having like a third of SP's total missions. I've played it both by myself and with a friend and still found it more interesting than SP, probably by virtue of the fact that the two commanders are typically split into two different tasks on each half of the map, like one running a distracting army while the other runs in a room to steal something before getting both commanders out. Some memorable missions include splitting the entire pool of commanders in Wargroove between both yourself and a friend for an all-out attack on THE BIG BAD(tm), freeing prisoners in a castle to unlock troops to help your buddy on the other side of the map, and combining you and your friend's naval and aerial forces to defeat the enemy.
Some comments on other topics:
art style is fantastic and the animations are so SMOOTH! I cannot say enough good things about Adam Riches' pixel art
commanders have a neat variety of groove abilities, and I actually liked figuring out how each one could be used through arcade mode runs, which probably puts me in the minority of people who like arcade
AI is serviceable enough but very simplistic and I am often confused by its priority rules when deciding how to move and attack; I have survived what I thought was guaranteed death on several occasions because the AI prioritized damaging a building or getting a first-hit advantage on some other unit over outright finishing me off
map designs are alright, nothing really stands out to me as especially crappy; SP maps are designed specific scenarios, like asking you to get from point A to point B, or surviving waves of enemies until a certain number of turns, while arcade/MP maps are pretty standard mirrored/symmetrical designs
great free DLC campaign with interesting commanders and two new units

Easy to interface with. ( For an old man like me)

advance wars for pc

My son and I have put many hours into Wargroove between Switch and PC. Mostly we play on Switch. After beating the campaign a couple of times, he's made countless maps and cinemas with ease because of the great tool-set. He reproduces maps from other games, and we play competitive, or he re-creates famous places we've visited in Europe. Wargroove has been a game changer and is really an inspiration for fans of the genre.

On a scale of 1 to Advance Wars I'll give it a 6.
Just doesn't have the same charm.

Played on Steam Deck.
I waited to play this on the Deck and I'm so glad because it's right at home and brought me back to Advance Wars on the GBA! The campaign is great and the puzzle, arcade, and co-op modes definitely put Wargroove in the gold standard for a tactics title.