IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name, Nintendo Gamecube Review of Nintendo's / Kuju's Battalion Wars 2006...

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IvanF's Cut and Paste, No-Name, Nintendo Gamecube Review of
Nintendo's / Kuju Entertainment's Battalion Wars 2005

"Wow, it's like I've been asleep throughout the entire lifespan of the Game Boy Advance or something. To be honest, I didn't even know that Nintendo had revitalized the Advance Wars series in the West until I finally got a GBA myself...

The last time I played a game in the Nintendo "Wars" series? Well, that was pretty much way back when it was still called Famicom Wars, and when Star Wars (or at least Return of the Jedi) was still considered the New Kid On The Block...

The thing is, even though I owned a GBA and had plenty of disposable cash to use on the Advance Wars series? I still haven't picked up a single AW game for the portable system, if only because my love for turn-based strategy games seemed to die out during the time of the original Civilization and Master of Orion 2...

You know, back when I was so damn clueless about video games, that I was actually shocked to see Super Mario Bros. 3 "unveiled" in The Wizard...

And also way back when movie-goers were still goddam frothing in anticipation, at the mere thought of the Star Wars prequel trilogy...

But because I seem to buy practically every goddam Gamecube game on the face of the planet, I picked up both Fire Emblem and Battalion Wars sometime last year without even considering what I was buying. And truth be told, I was so damn pleasantly surprised by the turn-based strategy of Fire Emblem GC, that I couldn't simply wait until I got more of the same godly goodness from the Battalion Wars series...

... which, as you may have guessed, provided quite another surprise to me as well...

Suffice to say, I was confused as hell when I finally looked at the back of the box, and realized that Battalion Wars was nothing like its predecessors. Instead, it had far more to do with Halo than it ever did with the turn-based strategy of the same series on the GBA... All the kickass concepts I had recently fallen back in love with, of just letting loose the dogs of war one step followed by another in time, was replaced by complete real-time action and the most funky of colourful graphics possible. WTF?...

The thing is though, I was pleasantly surprised yet again. I'm still reeling a bit from the fact that Battalion Wars simply was not the game that I had expected nor really wanted in the first place. But there's simply no denying, that Kuju really put a lot of that Nintendo touch and polish into this highly underrated (or at least, highly underpurchased) title...

The first thing I have to mention, is just how kickass it is to actually control an entire army in realtime. I mean, it's been attempted time and time again on consoles during this generation of gaming, from the completely independent AI of Halo marines, to micromanaging all the crap (including guys taking a crap) that your soldiers do in the Rainbow Six series...

And yet here, in Battalion Wars of all kiddie looking games? Here, the division and specialization of infantry and tanks and fucking air units is so damn fucking simple, that it puts to shame almost every "mature" war sim out there today... Using just the C-stick, it's ridiculously easy to switch between each of your groups of units, as it's absolutely no problem to attack one army of opponents with your flamethrower units, roar in a bunch of tanks to cover their asses, and then call in a fucking air-strike with your goddam jet fighters, just for shits and giggles as well...

The basic controls consist of just pressing R to aim, L to lock-on, A to shoot, B to jump, and Y to order your troops to kick ass and take names. It's absolutely one of the most intuitive control schemes I have ever come across in a war game before, and it simply puts to shame even the Battlefield series in just how damn easy it is to learn...

It's amazing just how quickly any regular Joe of a gamer can learn how to pilot a helicopter, or bomb a fucking fleet of tanks with a massive air battlestation and shit like that. Sometimes I do feel the controls are a bit floaty (considering you are floating in the air half the time) and weapon accuracy could be better, but that's just a small price to pay for one of the most enjoyable pick up and play combat games I have ever experienced in my life...

Sure, there are a few small problems with this set-up. Mainly, sometimes Nintendo and Kuju made it a little too easy to get your troops to follow a command, almost to the point where often enough times, you accidentally make them do shit that you don't want them to do...

Take for instance the X button. While pressing Y targets and sends in your troops for combat rolls and strafing maneuvers against an enemy, X recalls them back to your side in follow mode... The problem is, as far as I could tell, the X button seems to recall all of your troops, even the ones that you currently haven't selected. While sometimes that is a godsend (since you don't need to manually recall all your units individually), it really does fuck things over in the middle of combat, when you only want to reinforce your commander with a small little portion of your battalion and not the whole damn thing...

But for the most part? I was just as amazed with the overall AI of the game, just as much as I ever was when the first Halo debuted... Now, of course the naysayers will claim that your units in Battalion Wars do nothing completely wowing like the first time you saw the Sarge snipe an Elite in Halo. And I will agree, that perhaps it was just sheer dumb luck and laziness on the programmers' behalf, that the AI turned out to be so damn likable in Battalion Wars in the end...

But the fact of the matter is, except for maybe that X-recall issue I mentioned above? The AI has never done a completely dumbass thing on me. Not even once... Sure, they don't always target automatically the highest priority enemy (eg: units with AA artillery don't automatically seem to fire at approaching bombers). But they will always stand their ground, they will never ditch your side to go chase an enemy into suicidal territory, and they will never just stand there as target practice when an enemy is making a strafing run...

Hell, whichever programmer was actually smart enough to automatically make your units return to you after their target is eliminated is a fucking genius. Why the fuck can't other developers realize this same shit, whenever they leave my men just lying around in enemy territory as sitting ducks after they've got absolutely nothing better left to do?...

Your units may not be pure snipers, but all of them definitely are survivors. And while offensive wise, you do have to micromanage your units with the C-stick, it's rare that you ever have to truly take command and pull your hair out simultaneously, when it comes to certain death and defence (which is more than I can say for most of the AI units out there in combat games today)...

To be honest? The last time I was this impressed with how smooth and intuitive and natural feeling the commanding of units was in a game, was the last time I played Freedom Fighters for the GC/Xbox. And that one game alone somehow still serves as my true definition of exactly how to make gang warfare fun... While I suppose Battalion Wars can't quite reach up there on the same pedestal, even when it comes to taking out communism with an iron fist (a theme both games ironically seem to share)? There's simply no denying that BW completely beats the living crap out of Freedom Fighters in terms of graphics, style, presentation, framerate, and goddam mind-numbing action on screen...

It's amazing just how many explosions can occur on screen all at once in Battalion Wars, and yet the game never slows down. It always seems to chug away between 30 and 60 fps, and always seems to keep on smilin' in the end as well... The graphics are absolutely beautiful here, almost to the point where I could call them "Viewtiful". I mean, the bright colour schemes and cartoony characters really bring a false impression to anyone who only checks out the ads or the back of the box for the game, as Battalion Wars is probably one of the most hectic and eye-dropping feats of programming in this entire generation of gaming in terms of sheer, blistering action...

There is absolutely nothing, nothing on consoles today, that even remotely compares to the sight of dozens of infantry units on screen duking it out with jeeps and tanks and jet aircraft and fucking battlestations high in the sky, all at the same fucking time...

And it's not just the graphics themselves that are amazing. Because like I was just as impressed by the AI here in Battalion Wars as I was upon seeing the Marines first time in Halo? I am still just as damn amazed as the first time I jumped in a Warthog, at just how damn shockingly kickass the vehicle physics are in Battalion Wars...

While unfortunately for the image of the game, the infantry units seem far too cartoony with the way they bob their heads and prance about the battlefields? There is simply no denying, that the feeling you get while riding in a jeep here or soaring through the skies with a fucking locked and loaded gunship, is just as fucking impressive as any vehicle ride I've ever experienced in a console game before...

Now, just like with any "underrated" game, there are obvious drawbacks that perhaps made the game underrated in the first place. And yeah, I do wish at times that the aiming in Battalion Wars was quicker and more precise... You're forced to use the R button to look around, Metroid Prime style, not only for infantry and tanks, but also to change altitude as aircraft as well. This basically made the game feel like Metroid Prime lite in the end, as I was forced to constantly keep using the L button to lock onto enemies instead. And I sort of do wish the game could've found an identity of its own in terms of control, in that one small bastion of a regard at least...

I absolutely love the graphics, but I just can't say the same about the sound. The voices of the characters are meant to be funny, as a nice little throwback to the Cold War propaganda against communist Russia (go Freedom Fighters, go?)... But besides being (sadly) kinda hot, Betty was just a fucking bitch to listen to throughout the game. And not only was it completely jarring to see prerendered, full motion video in a Nintendo published game? But I really just couldn't give the slightest damn about any of the caricatures that Kuju forced upon us to watch in-between stages...

And absolutely the most unforgivable thing of all? It's the fucking fact that while Advance Wars has made a name for itself out of multiplayer, Nintendo chose to completely omit dueling action from the Gamecube version. WTF?... If any game out there was screaming and writhing in pain to have at least a deathmatch mode, if not a co-op mode, featuring dozens if not even hundreds of disposable units? Then this would be the game. And yet Nintendo chose to concentrate on the short (but sweet) four or five hour long single-player campaign instead?...

But I suppose, 'what the fuck' really does sum up everything that I knew (or thought I knew) about Battalion Wars as a whole...

I had thought it would be a turn-based strategy game, yet it turned out to be a 3rd-person Halo clone in the end. WTF?...

I had thought it would just be a 3rd-person Halo clone, and yet it turned out to be Metroid Prime lite with tons of units to command. WTF?...

And even more surprising than that? Battalion Wars turned out to be not only just a fun little addictive game, but absolutely perhaps the benchmark for all future battlefield games to be compared to in the future, both in terms of non-stop action and blessedly intuitive controls?...

I mean seriously, the last time I had officially even tried a game in the "Famicom Wars" series, was way back when "Yoda" and "The Force" were still fucking new terms to me... and that's definitely a long fucking time ago, from a galaxy far, far away...

Battalion Wars as a result not only feels like a completely new genre, but also somehow feels like a nice, nostalgic throwback to the golden age of video games as well. Back when I would actually dream of fun, innocent, little moments of blowing endless shit up like we can and do here...

I guess it's only fitting then, that I found Battalion Wars to be way more fun and way more engrossing, than the fucking Star Wars prequel trilogy ever was...

Now, what exactly does that Star Wars shit actually got to do with Battalion Wars? Beats the shit out of me...