Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp Review – Stronger with Age

Nintendo and WayForward risked a lot by resurrecting Advance Wars from the scrapheap with Advance Wars: Re-Boot Camp. They released a series of games that were heavy on tactics in a game genre defined now by characters relationships. The remakes change little from the original releases and don’t deepen the story or cast, but they don’t have to change anything. Advance Wars’ unique features are as apparent as ever. If anything, they’re made even stronger by the series’ extended absence.

Advance Wars lacks a story when compared with other tactical role-playing games. As a mysterious figure from the shadows manipulates the nations of Wars World, they are at the brink of war. Your job is preventing war from breaking out by… going to war. The setup doesn’t warrant too much thought and has big Saturday morning cartoon vibes, a feeling these new updates help heighten. Re-Boot Camp features new toybox-style graphics, a remastered soundtrack, sporadic voice acting, and a slightly tweaked script that brings out the most of every character’s personality. 

That new cartoon style also helps offset what’s otherwise a grim setup, where officers send scores of troops to die in battle without a thought for their welfare. Technically, that’s still what happens, but the new look makes each map like a game of toy soldiers, with maps even resembling a tabletop board when you zoom out. 

What hasn’t changed is the series’ take on the genre, which, more than 20 years after the first game was released, still feels fresh and innovative. These two Advance Wars titles combine real-time tactics with traditional elements of strategy, like a system that compares strengths and weaknesses between units. Advance Wars is a game where fuel and resource management are crucial. Controlling specific areas of the map and managing resources can also be vital to winning. Attention to detail in Advance Wars is so intense that even the interaction of tires with terrain has to be considered.

Every battle is a tense mixture of smart planning and wild improvisation, where victory feels well-earned – even if you barely manage to clear the objective. Every map is optimized, but because of the variety and strategic depth you have to try new things and earn high rankings. 

You can reset the current turn in both remakes as many times as you wish. It’s a helpful but clunky approach to making both games more approachable. You can only start again if a decision you made after three turns turns out to be a bad one. To save time you can speed up movement and disable animations, but an elegant solution would be to have a rewind function similar to that in Fire Emblem.

The range of choices may seem overwhelming, but Advance Wars does a superb job of teaching you the basics and even some advanced strategies at a steady pace – although it does this perhaps almost too well. Most of the first game plays like an extended tutorial, where you don’t get the full range of tools at your disposal until over halfway through the campaign.

Advance Wars 2, however, is stronger and confident. You will be controlling different COs for each nation. Each mission must take into account their unique strengths and weaknesses. It’s a brilliant exercise in iteration, with a well-designed set of new officers, clever new CO powers, and complex, sometimes uncompromising, maps that make the most of the series’ unique mechanics. 

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp might not include much new material, but it presents a strong case that classic games don’t always have to change to be relevant again. Some games just require a second shot.