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Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

I have often said that Advance Wars is the "Best Game on the Game Boy Advance," partially because it's true. However, all that was about to change with the release of Advance Wars 2. Unlike movies, videogame sequels typically eclipse their predecessor. The question then begged: would Advance Wars 2 be able to dethrone the original game and take its rightful place as King of the GBA?

Story

After having his butt royally handed to him in the first game, Sturm is back with his entire Black Hole Army to wreak even more havoc. This time, his goal is the invasion of Wars World, the home of all our friends in the nations of Orange Star, Blue Moon, Yellow Comet, and Green Earth. In fact, he's already established a huge presence on each of the main four continents and your goal is to liberate them. Here the game takes a slight departure from the original. Instead of following the exploits of the three Orange Star Commanding Officers, you fight seven or eight missions with each army against the four primary Black Hole CO's. At first this seemed cool, "Hot dawg!!! I can use Eagle!" But because of so many CO's to choose from (twelve in campaign mode), I never developed a close connection to any of the characters. I used Andy like two times total; it was crazy. I also realized that having Eagle, Kanbei, Olaf, and the rest were so much better enemies than the four here. Lash, Adder, Flak, and Hawke had no personality. Well, Flak and Hawke were Max-Lite and Eagle-Lite, respectively, but I never had that feeling I used to have of, "Oh crap, it's Eagle. I'm dead." I still can't tell you the difference between Adder and Lash, or what they exactly do. There simply wasn't as much individuality.

Gameplay

The first game had a tutorial mode, and a quite fabulous one at that. Upon setting out, I wondered if Advance Wars 2 was gonna have a tutorial mode for the AW newbies or just expect them to figure out how to play. I have played games with the latter option (YuGiOh comes to mind) and that's absolutely horrible. Unfortunately, Advance Wars 2 does provide you with a tutorial mode, except that it's mandatory. You are forced to go through ten missions where Nell, your tutor, teaches you to click on different units and move them. This essentially makes for a lot of pressing A, "Yeah, I know this. I wanna kill stuff." Even worse, all of the Orange Star missions are tutorials, and after that, it's sayonara Orange Star. Au revoir, Sami, Andy, and Max. That was somewhat sad for me.

Advance Wars 2 is your good old turn-based strategy game. For those of you unfamiliar with the turn-based aspect of strategy gaming, the game runs very similar to a game of Risk or chess. You can create new units, plot out troop movements over a grid-based system, and stage battles during the course of your turn. Here's how battles work: you engage the enemy from one of the four cardinal directions, and your attack percentage is shown. Every unit begins with ten hit points, and the percentage generally reflects how much damage will be dealt. Factors such as terrain (attacking a unit in the woods greatly increases its defense rating) and how much health the attacking unit has (you can only deal as much damage as is proportional to the attacking unit's health) go into the final total for damage. It's actually quite a deep system.

In Advance Wars, each Commanding Officer had his or her own special CO Power. This power, when charged up, produced a different effect depending on the CO. In Advance Wars 2, everything is bigger and better, and now there are Super CO Powers. Essentially, these a just sweeter versions of the original CO Powers, except for Sturm and Eagle's, whose original powers were so badass that they got turned into Super CO Powers (Eagle got a new pansy power and Sturm doesn't even have a normal power). Most of the Super CO Powers are pretty sweet. For instance, when Sami's is activated, any Infantry or Mech unit can capture a building in one turn, regardless of health. That's pretty sweet if you ask me. However, the best Super CO Power would have to be Sensei's power. This guy has the power to parachute in a permanent Mech unit onto every single city you own. It's amazing.

Previously, the queen of the playground was none other than the Medium Tank. Well, boys, it's time for the new king of beasts, the NeoTank! The NeoTank is to Medium Tanks what Medium Tanks to Small Tanks. On top of that, the NeoTank has a larger movement range than the Medium Tank. It would seem that it would be the perfect unit, and if you've got the dinero, then it's the perfect tool for laying down a siege or protecting a bridge. However, there's only one way to get the NeoTank in the game. With each army's set of missions, you have to capture an enemy city containing the map with the location of a hidden laboratory where the Black Hole Army is developing the NeoTank. By finding this map, and only one city in all of the army's missions has it, an extra mission is unlocked. If in the event that you do not locate this map, your army will not have the ability to create the NeoTank in later missions. The last two missions give you the ability to pick three CO's from the four armies, and my Green Earth and Yellow Comet CO's couldn't create the NeoTank.

Besides the NeoTank, there is only one new addition that the player can actually utilize. This is the Missile Silo. Just land an infantry unit on one of the silo locations, and you can you're your own personal Sturm CO Power, only it does three damage as opposed to eight. Once a silo is used, it's gone for good, which makes them kind of lame in my opinion. The computer A.I. is too smart to put anything close enough together to do any real damage. Also, the missile attacks cannot kill an enemy target. It will go as far as 1 HP and cease to do damage. Thus, I didn't care too much for Missile Silos, and would only shoot them off to prevent the enemy from getting to them first. The enemy also has a new thing called a Factory, which can produce three enemies at once, and can attack with them on that turn. Anything, and I mean anything, can be summoned via a pipeline connected to the Factory. This pipeline is impenetrable, and not even aircraft can fly over it (aircraft can fly over mountains, but not a lousy pipe). The only way to render a factory ineffective is to destroy the seam, which can be taken out easily enough with a bomber. Some levels just have pipes lying around to cause trouble. I've found that the computer will never destroy a pipe seam, even when there isn't a factory connected. So, you can just line up Rockets around the pipe, and take out everything from a safe distance without any fear of repercussion. Rounding out the new features are a host of different weapons that can only be used by the enemy. It must be known that these weapons have a listing of 99 HP (instead of ten), but it all relative to the percentage (so if your bomber says it will do 47% damage, it will take away 47 HP). Of the new weapons, there is the Mini-Cannon that does three damage to anything within three spaces in front of it (including aircraft). As you could correctly assume, if there is a Mini-Cannon, there must be a normal Cannon as well. This behemoth has a massive range (longer than rockets), and will do five damage to anything in its blast radius. Luckily, these two cannons can only attack one target per shot. But, there is the Laser that shoots a beam in four directions and will do a total of three damage to anything in the way, including enemy targets. Beware of creating lines around this sucker; you'll just get burned. There are two saving graces of these three deathrays. First, in most missions, it takes at least two days for the laser and cannons to charge, giving you time to plot an attack. This rule is thrown out in the later missions though, because of the enemy CO's "fixes" the cannons to fire every day. Second, like the missile silos, they cannot deliver the finishing blow. This helps if you manage to sneak in a bomber (which does 10 points of damage even at 1 HP).

In the original game, the only way to win a mission was to capture the enemy Headquarters or destroy every enemy on the screen. In Advance Wars 2, the focus has been changed to the elimination of specific targets. For instance, a lot of missions' objectives are, "Eliminate the three cannons," or, "Destroy the pipeline." This is all well and good, as it spices up the game from the total annihilation norm, but I found it made missions way too easy. You've probably heard that AW2 is a lot tougher than the original, but it's a lot easier to play cheap in Advance Wars 2. To understand this statement, you must first understand me. I have moral qualms about beating a game unfairly. For instance, on the last mission, my entire base had been invaded and I was going have my HQ captured on the following turn. I managed to sneak a lone Bomber into enemy territory, unleash Eagle's Super CO Power (get an extra move), and blow up my target in one move to beat the game. Had I not pulled through at that exact moment, I would have lost. There was no strategy involved, and the computer played the superior match. I felt it was unfair.

In addition to the normal Campaign Mode, there are several other modes. There's the War Room, a random collection of different maps to play (most of these maps were found in the first game's War Room though). Most of these are great for a quick pick up and play gamers who don't want to deal with that whole story thing. Also, all of the levels save your high score, so you can replay these as many times as you want for bragging rights. If it's bragging rights you really want, you can always play multiplayer against your friends. Each of you can play with your own system, which, considering it's turn-based, isn't practical unless you're playing with Fog-of-War. It's much easier to just pass around the same Game Boy from person to person (which Advance Wars 2 conveniently allows for). Feeling daring? Try out the Hard Campaign after you beat the Normal Campaign. Oh man, it's bloody difficult. I swear I spent more time on the first level of the Hard Campaign than the last level in the Normal Campaign. If that's not your bag, you can always make your own map and duke it out against your friends. I made a Ninja Turtle island, and I would argue that it's the best map ever.

Visuals

The Wars series has never been known for its graphical flair, and this installment is no different. The little sprites are simplistic in design, but are easy to distinguish from one another. It was pure stroke of genius for Intelligent Systems to have the five armies have completely different colors, so there's never any confusion of, "Are those mine?" The coolest part, however, are the little fight cut-scenes that ensue every time you enter a fray. Somehow I get a sick pleasure out seeing a tank totally waste five little infantry guys and seeing them fly off the screen. Also impressive is the way that each army's vehicles look different from the others' in the battles. So yeah, nothing much has changed. In fact, the only new thing I can really see is that the designs of the cities and bases have been altered ever so slightly. Other than that, this game looks the exact same as the original.

Advance Wars 2 also give you the option of altering your favorite CO's color scheme in the Design Room. I naturally assumed that this would mean I could do anything to my character's colors, through the use of a paintbucket type thing. Not so. You first have to purchase the ability to change each CO's colors (150 points per CO), and then you're given the choice of eight different color schemes. If none of those suit your fancy, well, then you're just S.O.L. The game does, however, give you a color scheme that gives Olaf a red costume with a white beard to look like jolly St. Nick, and that is most definitely worth it. On a side note, all of the CO illustrations have been redone. Andy looks a little more mature, Eagle looks younger, Nell is even more beautiful, and Kanbei doesn't look like a wimpy Saddam Hussein anymore. Sadly though, Sonja just simply isn't as hot as she was in the last game. Alas...

Audio

Usually I'm not really one for paying attention to the music or sound effects in a game. It just doesn't really matter to me, especially with the SP, because I don't want to disturb people with sonic pollution and I don't have a headphone adapter. Plus, Advance Wars 2 has the obnoxious little "ding" everytime you are reading and click to advance. This usually is enough for me to totally renounce the audio section (cough cough Dragon Warrior). But I gave it a chance, I discovered the music's pretty sweet. I'm mostly basing this off of Grit's theme (each CO has a different theme), which is a slow, meandering Cajun tune. The sound effects, which are great, have been recycled from the original game, but hey, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

This game gets an N-Philes score of A+.

The question all comes down to: Is it better than the first Advance Wars adventure? That's a stumper and I'm not sure I'm fit to answer it. They both play basically the same, although Advance Wars 2 has more of a focus on destroying targets (usually cannons) whereas the only way to win in the first game was to capture the enemy HQ or destroy all of the enemy units. Other than that, Advance Wars 2 is essentially the same exact game, so it's simply a matter of choice. From my perspective, I prefer the original on the sole basis of storyline, because it provides for a greater variety of enemy CO's and aids in creating a close bond with your own CO's. Either way, it's still a great game and is co-owner of the crown when it comes to "Best Game Boy Advance game."

Posted in: Reviews