In this day and age of gameplay coming second to high-def visuals, I usually can’t be bothered to check out the latest high-profile titles the portable world has to offer. There are only two franchises that exist with enough draw to pull me away from 1080p gaming and into a 3 inch screen for weeks at a time: Final Fantasy Tactics, and Advance Wars. I’ve always thought the latter to be a perfect choice for the DS, as touch controls are ideal for moving troops around (and it also helps that the DS is now as trendy as an iPod). Portable systems like the gba and ds, though lacking in the horsepower necessary to pull off big time graphics, are perfectly designed for strategy games.

You’re nearly always looking at a top-down wide-area map of a million squads of guys, positioned over what is meant to be miles of differing terrain. From that high up, they’d look like pixellated red and blue blobs anyway, right? Advance Wars has kept the same look through all of its esteemed titles, but the newest installation, while having about the same graphical strength to it, has adopted a new art style, and I’m sure all that you’ve heard about the game is that it’s trying hard to be “darker” than the series’ previous entries. It certainly succeeds where the others have failed in conveying a true sense of urgency and danger in the face of total war. The cartoonish Commanding Officers (COs) of the last few generations of Advanced Warring have been very quick to discard their troops without a second thought, throwing waves of infantry into meat grinders built of tanks and anti-personnel turrets, with their only intention being to teach a young, headphone-wearing, l33tspeaking teenager the basic idea that “tiny shit-guns don’t work well against giant metal motherfuckers fueled by hatred and purpose.”

The CO’s in DoR treat war like war in all of the dialogue, and the strategies they discuss and employ seem functional and probable enough that I can pretend that I’m in a real war room without having the illusion dashed by a girl who uses her make-up and pouting lips to make her tanks move twice as far. I’m about three-quarters of the way through the campaign, and besides feeling a genuine attachment to some of the main characters, I find myself completely swept up in the plot describing the trials of a group of soldiers struggling to survive against those who would use the disaster that obliterated their world (some meteors- maybe I didn’t mention that earlier) as an opportunity to claim power. Even if you disregard their realistic goals and personalities, the character art has taken a distinctly more grown-up approach, and they look much less kid-manga than Andy and his stupid friends.

As far as gameplay goes, it hasn’t changed much since DualStrike. If there’s anything you can try to pin as a flaw in this game, it could only be that the series is quite plainly not attempting to innovate in any significant way. Though the campaign and characters may change, the game is, at its core, the same. Most, however, (myself included) see this as a good thing. You select units, move them, fire on your opponents. You can use the stylus to do all this, if you’d like. One nice change is the option to zoom the screen in on the battlefield. You see about half as much, making it a little frustrating (for me, personally) to coordinate complicated assaults. The bonus is that it makes the units look a great deal more detailed. Once again, who really cares? Who really cares? It’s a tactical strategy game on the ds; I’m going to go ahead and assume the majority of you don’t care about whether or not you can see the caliber of the barrel on your Md tanks.

One other significant item to note: the music in this game is fantastic. Just as in the other AW titles, it is unique to every CO. Your turn starts, your music starts, gearing you up for the battles to come. It’s all loaded with distorted guitar, a sound set that benefits from the DS speakers as the rasp produced is mostly intended. The riffs are memorable and inspiring, and are one of my favourite components of the game.

The strategy truly takes a step up in this game. The removal of the magic CO Powers I’m sure is an unwelcome surprise for some, but they really went a long way toward making it less a war strategy game and more a “pump units into a funnel of destruction until my power gauge fills up and I win” kind of game. The addition of a few new units is expected out of an Advance Wars title, but the selection they give you here I really feel changes the game - definitely for the better.

Anti-tank units can fire a special form of rockets indirectly on, you guessed it, Tank units. There is finally a way to dispatch a foe’s Md and War Tanks without just building some of your own, driving their slow asses over to them, and having them hammer each other until they are both destroyed. The Anti-tank can also defend itself when under direct fire with machine gun turrets, immediately making it the most valuable indirect unit, in my opinion. To balance out this ass-kicking machine, it’s fairly expensive, and the range on its rockets is more restricted than a standard rocket unit.

They also added the Duster, a unit of planes with machine guns that can attack any unit, land, air and sea. Cheap and proportionately weak, they add versatility to a ground force, and the ability to get a presence in the skies quickly. The Carrier is the big addition to naval combat, an expensive, big slow boat with little defenses, its strength lies in its ability to produce Sea-Planes, a moderately priced plane with a low amount of fuel, but since they use air-to-surface missiles, they pose a major threat with a high attack rating and the ability to smoke any target. On the ground they added the War Tank, instead of a unit of tanks, you just get the one, but the one is the size of a fucking house. It behaves exactly like the giant tank from DualStrike - It’s slow and fiendishly expensive, with an attack that is simply ridiculous. The final new addition is the bike-infantry unit. Lil’ more expensive than infantry, but a great deal faster. Only downside is that they can’t climb mountains or cross rivers - a choice the player has to make.

That’s the beauty of strategy games: Choice! You get to make the call in regard to how to run your army. Tank-rush? Bombers covered by fighters and anti-air? Territory control with bikes, rigs and infantry? Endless choice. This game really makes you feel like you can put a strategy together and watch it play out, with all the emotions of a real war there to spur you forward, if you want them. All of that in a tiny portable… not bad at all.