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Reviews » Battalion Wars [GCN]

I first heard about Battalion Wars about two years back during E3. Back then it was tentatively being called "Advance Wars GCN". I was never the biggest Advance Wars fan on the planet, but the Wars (Famicom Wars, Advance Wars, etc) series was a popular and quite successful one, so surely it could do well on the Cube. And hey, maybe this time I wouldn't suck at it, like I did with the first Advance Wars game. By the time E3 2005 rolled around, the game was actually being shown under the title "Battalion Wars", and it looked pretty neat. Months earlier we had seen how a more realistic version of this could work when Lucasarts released Mercenaries, so this could be like Mercenaries, but fitting within the exaggerated style of the Wars series. I still had a nagging question, though: what was with the name change? To fit, shouldn't it be Cube Wars or something thereabouts? Could they be trying to distance themselves from the established and successful series?

When the initial previews were lukewarm I downgraded this from "Buy Immediately" to "Rent Eventually". When Blockbuster didn't get it in stock for several weeks past the releasedate I really started to worry about the quality of this game. Once I finally got ahold of it all my fears were confirmed. This game is bad. It's clunky, confused, frustratingly difficult, ridiculously exaggerated (in a bad way), short, and above all - just not fun. So, how did this go wrong? People have made squad-based real time strategy games before, so why would this be so bad? The short version is Control. The long version will follow shortly.

Before I dissect the multitude of reasons why the game is bad, let me first explain what it is. Battalion Wars is a cutesy little third-person squad-based real time strategy game. You take command of a little nameless grunt fighting an irrelevant little war. You can command a wide variety of units like infantry, bazooka-troops, flamethrower infantry, tanks, artillery, scout jeeps, etc. Every unit has it's specialty. Infantry are bulk fodder. Bazooka troops work best against tanks or other vehicles. Missile troops are anti-air. Flame troops are anti-infantry. Really generic stuff, much of which was directly cribbed (and rightfully so) from Advance Wars.

The game itself is made up of 20 levels split (unevenly) into four campaigns. When you start off a level, you're given a short overview of what's going on, what you're up against and what your mission objectives are. You're then dropped into control of one unit. Here's where the pain starts. At any given time you can directly control one unit. Everything else on the map is AI, which isn't incredibly bright. For your one little guy, you can run, jump, shoot, roll, etc. For shooting you can either aim manually or lock on a target and fire. Now, you're not generally the only unit under your command. In some levels you are, but usually there's at least someone else around. For your other units, you can tell them to do one of four things: charge, attack my target, follow me, defend this position. That's it. These commands are all issued by first selecting some troops and hitting either X or Y. Some toggle, some switch immediately, but units can only have one setting at any given time.

This in itself is a problem. I like versatility in an RTS. I need to be able to tell units "Go Here and Wait" or "Go Here and Patrol", and most importantly, I need to be able to change these commands QUICKLY. Which leads us to the next major problem: unit selection. As I said, before you issue a command, you have to pick a target unit. This isn't point-and-click like you'd expect from a traditional PC RTS, because here on the Cube we can't point-and-click. So instead, you get to deal with navigating through a tree with your C-stick. When you pick up new units, they get added to your battalion. The battalion is your top level selection point. If you don't move your C-stick, all commands you issue go to EVERYONE under your command. So if your finger slips and you accidentally tell your entire Battalion to go blow up that giant army of tanks, well, you get to feverishly remember how to tell them all to stop before those tanks notice. Luckily, there are lower levels, but they're buried down there rather well. Move the C-stick left or right and you select classes within your Battalion. This is nice, because it means you can tell just your infantry and flame infantry to follow you, or just instruct your bazooka guys to go attack the big tank. If you want to select individual units, you can navigate left or right to get to a class, and then hit up and down to select an individual unit. Finally, if you want to change what kind of unit you're individual controlling, select a unit or a class and hit Z.

Now, this might sound like it'd work pretty well. It doesn't. If this was a turn-based strategy game it might work, but I'd rather have a cursor in that situation. In an RTS if you can't tell your brain dead squad units to RUN AWAY FROM THE GIANT TANK fast enough, they all die, and since this is an RTS with no unit building, if you lose a unit it's gone. More importantly, since you have no way to tell a unit to go somewhere, you'll be spending nearly all your time babysitting your troops. It's far too difficult to utilize complex tactics, so your best bet is to take each step like this:

1. Tell your entire battalion to wait somewhere safe, preferably under cover.
2. Scout out the target area solo, as a disposable unit like a grunt or something fast like a scout jeep.
3. Head back to your squad and select just the units you need, but only in entire-class chunks. You don't want to take just one or two bazooka troops because if you need to issue commands for them FAST you won't have time to select individual guys.
4. Go to the target area and clean up.
5. Tell your entire battalion to follow you and group up.

This is slow. It's conservative, it's safe, but it's SLOW. Unfortunately, in later levels, it's how you HAVE to play, because if you just rampage around however you want, you'll be completely decimated before you can tell what's going on.

Now, lets pretend you don't believe me, and think you'd be perfectly able to perform some big complex tactical strike. Let me tell you how this could play out. Here's the scenario: there is an enemy encampment made up of a couple standard infantry and three heavy tanks. You want to have a squad of one tank and four bazooka troops around back to sneak in after your normal infantry units create a distraction near the main entrance. Here's how that would work.

1. Spend a minute or so wrangling up your heavy strike team.
2. Lead their painfully-slow selves over to the staging area.
3. Take control of someone back at base and wrangle up your distraction forces.
4. Lead them to the front entrance.

Ok, now you've got them in place. So from here you have to decide: do I manually control the distraction, and make sure these guys stay alive long enough to work as a distraction, or do I manually control the real assault, and be worried that the distraction will be dead due to some manner of idiocy before you get there? These kinds of complex maneuvers require precise timing and a level of control that the game just doesn't provide. So it seriously isn't worth even trying. Conservative surgical strikes are your best bet, but those just aren't fun.

I'm pretty sure the game isn't inherently not-fun, though. If the control system didn't suck so entirely, it might be a pretty decent game. But I can't think of a single way that you could better set up the controls and have it still work on the Gamecube. Beyond the controls, everything else is just incredibly bland. The plot is mundane and ignorable. The characters are cookie-cutter. The music is the most forgettable music I've come across in any game recently. The missions I played (I made it through the first campaign) were boring, too. Kill these tanks. Defeat these squads. Raise that flag. I've played flash games with more varied missions.

So please, don't waste your time with this. I wish I hadn't. Please let my rental serve as a warning to the rest of you.

Battalion Wars - GCN

Presentation

Annoying NPCs, lackluster graphics, forgettable settings and music. It isn't really bad, it's just incredibly boring.

Gameplay

Repetitive, mind numbing, kludgy: all words which aptly describe my experience with this game.

Replayability

After beating the game there's nothing left. Sure, you can go back and try to get an S-rank on all the missions but that's it.

Value

Retail price for a short horrible game? Sign me up!

Overall

Please avoid this game at all costs. It is not worth your time or money whatsoever.