DS Review: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

The Advance Wars series has always been known for its unusual, almost disturbingly lighthearted take on the brutality of war. In fact, that very aspect of the series is what has largely drawn in so many so many fans of the franchise who enjoyed its colorful, up-beat style. Yet with Days of Ruin, Advance Wars finally decides to take itself seriously, bringing some lessons about the true nature of war along with it.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is the fourth entry in the critically praised grid-based strategy series. Therefore, as you’d expect, the gameplay is very familiar for returning tacticians. You begin many battles with virtually nothing, and then build your grand army with the use of factories, ports, airports, and other resources. As the turn-based game progresses, you move your units along a grid with the objective of either capturing your opponent’s headquarters or demolishing their entire army. Sounds like fun, right? Lucky for you, it’s not just fun, it’s a blast!

At first glance, you may not notice just how much has changed with this installment. Yes, the core mechanics remain the same, but the gameplay has been tweaked to not only make the game more strategic (and less reliant on luck), but to balance just about everything in the game. For example, CO powers are no longer the drastically powerful, game-changing forces they were previously. Instead, your CO is actually embedded into a unit on the battlefield, with that particular unit emitting a range of effect that gives bonus stats to all units within that area. When your meter builds up through attacking other units, you have the ability to use your CO power. While the CO powers still have an effect on battles, they don’t have the overly dramatic effects that they had in Dual Strike (at last, no more ridiculous tag powers!). Along with this, infantry units are no longer as “spammable” as they were in previous games (although I’ve already experienced plenty of this online), units such as the Neotank and Megatank have been ditched in favor of the War Tank, and of course new units like the anti-tank have been added to the large roster of units.

But that’s probably not the change that’s most apparent about Days of Ruin. In case you haven’t noticed already, Days of Ruin aspires for a more realistic take on war. That shows heavily in both the art style and the brand new world of characters. The fresh post-apocalyptic storyline focuses around a young man named Will, who is rescued by a band of military survivors of the Rubinelle Army called “Brenner’s Wolves”. After meeting Captain Brenner, Will is instantly inspired by the war hero personality of this tough faced soldier. Unfortunately, Will and co. face a plethora of new problems in this ruined world, particularly two nations still fighting a pointless war and bandits running rampant terrorizing helpless civilians. To say the least, this is not the sugar coated story seen in past games, which I can absolutely say is a great thing. The new storyline has a bigger emphasis on, well, actually developing a story. To put things in perspective, imagine a “Fire Emblem meets Advance Wars” deal in the sense that we now have the great story of the Fire Emblem series combined with the spectacular gameplay of the Advance Wars series.

This leads me to what is probably the greatest part of Days of Ruin, the multiplayer. As you can imagine, multi-card play is available for both local battles and map trading. Gone, however, is the single-card play in the last game that allowed you to play the real-time “Combat Mode” (which is also gone). On the flip side, you can still pass around your DS using a single cartridge and system to play a multiplayer match with up to four players. But that’s probably not what excites you about this game, is it? The online play, I’m thrilled to report, is about as fluid and fun to play as you would expect from this game. Little, if any lag was noticeable during playtime, and the many features included in the package are more than enough to provide hours upon hours of replay value. The only downside that I could see, was that map trading online was limited to only 10 X 10 size maps (smaller than you think), and that the worldwide online play does not feature voice chat or as many customization options as the friends-only online play. Despite those small issues, though, you couldn’t ask for a much better online feature in an Advance Wars game. Days of Ruin may have lost a good bit of features from the last game in the process of being developed, but Intelligent Systems’ clear focus on creating a solid online mode more than makes up for it.

Graphically, Days of Ruin shows vast improvement over Dual Strike, both technically and artistically. The new art style fits in very well with the series and the refined combat, and the graphics themselves are a lot crisper and truly shine as a Nintendo DS quality display. Character models show much more detail, with units having a more rounded and non-pixelated look to them and the hand-drawn character models having a shine to them not seen in the past Advance Wars game. Even the battle scenes have a more fluid and detailed look to them, and yet they still maintain the top-notch quality of the battle scenes in past games as well. Visually, this is an appropriate step forward for the franchise.

On the audio front, Days of Ruin is positively radiant. The theme music specifically is quite catchy, and will instantly draw your attention. Add in some effective battle music, and some great character theme music and you have a solid soundtrack… dare I say one of the best soundtracks in an Advance Wars game yet. Sound effects are also more distinguishable, not necessarily leaps and bounds better than Dual Strike, but definitely show improvement.

Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is everything that you could want in a sequel and more. It stands out not only as the first great Nintendo DS game of 2008, but quite simply as one of the best games to hit the popular portable yet. Refined, more strategic gameplay helps make the game more approachable than it was before, but yet still manages to improve just about every facet of the franchise. The fact that Intelligent Systems took a risk that was, in reality, unnecessary, and still came out on top proves that the development studio has still got the magic touch on the strategy genre. Advance Wars: Days of Ruin continues the legacy of the franchise, and keeps its crown of being one of the best strategy games on the market.

Things we liked:

Still doesn’t have true single-card play

Final Score: 9.0/10