Battalion Wars Review (no fat)

Game Description

Battalion Wars Storyline

Battalion Wars is based on the typical political intrigue of a third nation trying to reap the benefits of skirmishes between two nations. The story is about the nations of Western Frontier and the Tundran Empire. While the two arch rivals war, the evil Xylvanians attempts to take advantage of the weakened states. On the prospect of a common enemy, Western Frontier and Tundran Empire work out an agreement to join hands in their bid to counter the Xylvanians.

Battalion Wars Gameplay

Whenever it comes to strategic ‘war’ games, the natural picture that comes in mind is fierce battlefields with hard faced soldiers shouting commands and firing fiercely. But just like their previous venture, Advanced Wars, Kuju Entertainment have employed charming and cutish looks to Battalion Wars making it substantially different from other action strategy games where seriousness is de facto. Even with the look of Battalion Wars, you can’t be fooled by the cute faces and cartoonist looks, this game is solidly designed to be an feature packed action strategy game that will give even experienced players a run for their money.

The game is basically a well designed third person shooter with solid real time action strategy mix. You are a field officer in the Western Frontier Army facing the challenge of capturing enemy bases and foiling the enemy operations in 20 nicely designed and varied missions.

A unique aspect of the game is that you can constantly swap roles. You can switch from infantry, to maneuver vehicles, driving planes and taking on the enemy sitting pretty in tanks. Once you have taken control of an individual soldier, you can make him roam around the battle field, jump; shoot at enemies and so on. You can also manage units of soldiers and command them to follow you, destroy an enemy or patrol alongside the battle field.

As you advance through the campaigns, you can unlock different vehicles, weapons and units and gain more flexibility and commanding power. Once you achieve your objectives, new campaigns are unlocked as bonus.

Battalion Wars Mission Stats

Just as in their Advanced Wars series, Kuju use the evaluation feature after each completed mission. The player is graded on the basis of speed, power and technique. Speed is a measurement of the time in which player completed the mission, power gives a good indication of the amount of enemy gunned down by the player and technique judges the player on the basis of how many units of player were lost during the campaign. A fighting urge to excel on all these factors makes the game playable again and again trying out different tactics.

Battalion Wars Real Time Strategy and AI

Battalion Wars’ RTS gameplay is designed to keep you on you vigil at all times. Unlike the most action strategy games, where speed is the only concern, the game is highly ambitious in accommodating real world features which makes all the factors such as size, speed, type of weapon and infantry important in this game. Although the objective is to gun the enemy down, one has to take care of all the fronts and not combating only the enemy who is coming in the way. Each unit has its strengths and weaknesses, if you overlook those you are a goner.

Enemy is very smart and has the capability of assessing in real time the strengths and weakness of the infantry and attacking your vulnerable and loosely guarded areas. Also, the enemy adapts to the every move made by you and once you have applied a specific trick successfully on the enemy it is unlikely that the same trick will yield the same results next time again.

Battalion Wars Controls

Along with the large number of controls comes the frustration. The game has the limitation of commanding each group singly which becomes a very frustrating feature when the number and types of units to be commanded is very large. There is no way to link different troops and order them to move as a single entity. So to assign target for different troops and to toggle between the troops you have to use C stick each time round.

Battalion Wars Visuals

Although linked with the popular Advanced Wars series on the handhelds, Battalion Wars is one of the first console games which gives the serious situations of wars a cuddly and cute look and feel. Soldiers and troops don’t sport a tough look on their face but resemble more like comic characters and have kiddish looks. Animated cut scenes that explain different situations of the game in the beginning and in between the game convey the story and provide for nice viewing.

All of the troops and vehicles from a particular country sport same color of uniform, with Green as the color of choice for the Western Frontier; Tundran forces are in red; and the evil Xylvanians in blue. With the help of this color code, one can easily differentiate between friend and foe and adds to cartoonish looks of the game. Technically, the game’s graphics have mostly polygonal detail. The whole concept of sporting cute face to a war game makes the game original and a very delightful experience.

Battalion Wars Audio

Audio in Battalion Wars is as fabulous as the game itself and accompanies right from the moment game is launched. Sounds for firing, bombing, vehicles, commands from commanders and those issued by the player to the troops are very clear and nice. Commanders of higher ranks and characters in animated sequences have a characteristic voice of their own, for example Xylvanians talk in a German accent. Every feature of the game has audio well suited to it with machine guns having their typical sharp flaring sounds, bombings to rattle your ears.

Battalion Wars Summing Up

All is not good with Battalion Wars, it is crippled with some low level design of command and menu layout design which makes the game frustrating. No multiplayer support is also a negative for the game. So once you successfully accomplished all the campaigns, then there is on offer except for trying to improve scores…

However, if you are a strategy buff with some flair for FPS and a taste for funny situations, you are definitely going to enjoy having this relatively short voyage into the RTS world.

Battalion Wars Cost

The game is available at the price of $49.99US at the time of writing.