Advance Wars

Advance Wars is a turn-based tactical strategy that was released early in the GBA lifecycle on September 10th, 2001. The game shares some similar gameplay with Fire Emblem, given that they were both developed by Intelligent Systems. Upon discovering this, I was excited to finally give Advance Wars a try. What followed was a solid handheld experience with some rough edges. In a lot of ways, Advance Wars feels like a precursor game - there are plenty of grating gampeplay elements, difficulty jumps, and even some softlocks. With that in mind it still delivers many hours of rewarding tactical gameplay, but the area for improvement is sometimes too hard to ignore. Maybe it has aged poorly, or maybe Advance Wars 2 resolves a lot of the blatant issues - I'll have to play it sometime and find out.

Play it for the:

• Tactical strategy gameplay
• Amount of content and replayability
• Portability

Reviewed on 2025-2-5