Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp (2023)

It's insane how much better advance wars 2 is compared to the first one. I think it's mostly due to the fact that there's more variety in mission objectives now, and they incentivize a more aggressive playstyle instead of hunkering down and slowly letting the enemies come to you.

You get to play as a lot more COs now, with every mission being different instead of letting you choose one of the Orange Star protagonists. This kinda kills the variety in enemy fights, as basically every fight is against the same three COs, but also forced the designers to be more creative when making the levels themselves. Their abilities are pretty generic as well, most of them being boosts to their stats. It's pretty boring, yes, but it also prevents the designers from basing levels around giving the enemy a huge advantage and making you fight your way through it. Most missions now revolve around a specific objective or a gimmick, and I think that's a fair exchange.

Yeah the level design is pretty bad actually. I'm about 12 levels into the first game, and it feels like every single one of them was specifically made to be as unfair as possible.

All commanders have downsides, but it's like each battle I go through was hand-crafted to offset these limitations and screw you over. Fighting against the guy whose units cost more? No factories in the map and they start with more tanks. Fighting against the guy that's useless close-range? Fog of war, and all their range units are hidden. Fighting against the guy with low defenses? You only get a few units to fight back, and no way to build more. Good luck!!!!

And it's not like the levels are hard or anything, they're just annoying, and only difficult until you realize the exact way the game wants you to play in order to beat each mission. 90% of the time, the solution is to play super deffensively and turtle your way to victory. That's not very fun!!!

The narrative doesn't fit the gameplay either. I guess levels like these could probably work in a game with an underdog story, where you're a developing nation whose been stripped of their resources and now has to fight back against its opressors using guerilla tactics, but no you're just some guy who commands an army trying to fend off invaders (and having fun while doing so, I love murder!). It's so weird.