David Silvera

I write this as an avid Advance Wars fan. I thoroughly adore the original versions of this remake and I was immensely excited to learn about Re-Boot Camp. I am in two minds about this - for the positives, it is faithful to the originals, the UI is visually nice and feels like a modern reimagining of the classic menu, the music is awesome, modern reworks of those classic tunes we all know and love... I absolutely loved the intro cutscene and the way it provides some visual backstory for that original Advance Wars 1 cover art! As for the negatives.. there are sadly many. First - my major issue is that the game feels laggy. It is full of latency issues, animations are clunky and irregular in timing, control is given back to the player after laggy animations finish, animations like using your CO power take WAY too long to complete, what happened the fast, smooth, low-latency input of the GBA release? Certain screens have bady placed loading going on so that text laggily moves across the screen while the loading takes place, even though we have dedicated loading screens for that. Is it not hilarious and depressing that we have gone TWENTY YEARS and an unimaginable increase in processing power, only to have an worse, laggier, clunkier game from a UX standpoint? This is an embarrassment and the developers should be working incredibly hard to address this, but I don't imagine they will. Second - the art direction is bland to say the least. We've gone from beautiful, stylish pixel art oozing with character and style, to totally generic, run-of-the-mill mobile game quality. It's sad. These 3D models look amateurish. Even if they were aiming at the "plastic figures" vibe, that shouldn't preclude having some DETAIL on the models. They are incredibly flat and boring to look at. The symbols for the various armies are just slapped on with little thought, there is no detail on anything.. Why did we decide to remove the wonderful animations like a battleship firing off all of its cannons in sequence? They just sort of lazily spurt everything out in one shot now.. It's no where near as satisfying! Advance Wars should give you that satisfying feeling of watching those adorable little units go into combat with their lovely animations. Instead we have amateurish, lazy, obviously rushed 3D models jankily wobbling around. Compare how it looks to the originals and I think the majority will agree that what we have now is lacklustre. It's a shame for sure. I'm not saying we need pixel art - I actually like the idea of bringing it into the modern age visually, but this could be done with some prowess. Lastly, the sound design is just a disappointment. Like I said, the music itself is great - very pleased with that. But the sound effects/foley are lacking hugely. Cannons sound weak and badly clipped, tanks moving sound jarring.. What happened guys? You'd be better off just using the original sound files from the GBA honestly. How is it that this is what we get after 20 years of the industry moving forward? Having said all this - at LEAST it is still Advance Wars. It's a brilliant game, no matter what they do to how it looks. The game could have no animations at all and still be somewhat engaging because of the genius gameplay. I love the idea that kids of today might pick up this game and fall in love with its awesome mechanics and campaign/characters just like I did as a youngster. It's a shame that they won't get to experience that polished, fast, responsive, visually striking and stylish game that I did.