Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

War, eh? What's it good for? Well, if you can ignore the political aspects it seems to make for a pretty good DS game.

Famicom Wars has come a long way since it started out on the Famicom (no surprise there). It only came to the attention of gamers outside Japan with Advance Wars, which many thought revolutionised strategy games. It's fair to say, though, the series has been on a bit of a maturity trip. While Advance Wars was all about anime graphics and animated characters, Black Hole Rising went for a slightly less cartoony approach. That was revisited in Dual Strike with its more realistic CO graphics. Dark Conflict completely turns the series around. Advance Wars has been the only series since the days of Worms and Hogs of War that successfully balanced that peculiar mixture of rock solid strategy and light-hearted humour. Not so in Dark Conflict.

It's not the story of...

THE GOOD:
There's many good things about this game. It has a really good story, and very likeable characters, and it is an all around good Strategy RPG.

THE BAD:
The only thing I didn't like about the game was the battle scenes. It made the game seem like the soldiers were little pieces of paper blowing away in the wind.

SUMMARY:

The gameplay in this game was great, very exciting for me, with it being my first Advance Wars game and my first Strategy RPG in general. The story is very nice, the idea that the world is ending leads into chaos and the army having to control rebellions and such is a nice, refreshing twist on the usual kids stuff I find on the DS. The plot also feels fresh, with no repeating what other companies had done, so this feels like a story all on its...

THE GOOD:
Characters have a more mature, less cartoon-like design to them. CO powers do not dominate the game as much as in the others, campaign story is much better than those of its predecessors, new units and changes made to old units and gameplay in general are for the better, WIFI mode is now available

THE BAD:
Some of the characters still have a childish feel, campaign difficulty seems a little unbalanced, no way to adjust the difficulty level of enemy AI in skirmish matches, WIFI mode has problems

SUMMARY:
Though each of the games in the Advances Wars series has been high in quality and full of replay value, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is quite possibly the best in the series yet. There are, of course, several reasons for this so first I'll start with the character design.

One of the things that always kept me a little distant from the previous Advance Wars games is the cartoon-like style of the characters. Needless to say,...

THE GOOD:
Allot of things to put here.
Graphics are a much needed improvement, story line has a nice twist, and the new units are a must see. Needless to say, this is a new advance wars style that I believe everyone is going to love.

THE BAD:
Ehh...besides the new graphics, they can sometimes look cheesy. The close ups on the artillery's look pixelated and when the missiles hit the target, the picture looks too real and the pixel attacks kinda suck. Not too much though, overall great.
Whats wrong with Wi-Fi? You have to keep track of your own record? No automatic win/loose feature you can just look at?
Sometimes there are some non-needed battles after a cut scene.

SUMMARY:
One of the best games that you can get, honestly. The other Advance wars games don't come close to this one, don't mind me wrong though... those were great. Although it may seem that I'm giving it much praise, there are a flaws in the game that are...