What's an airport, again? Let's play Advance Wars!

So, you asked for Advance Campaign feedback.

It is genuinely a different beast from the regular campaign, but something I like a lot. As you indicated, it's basically a puzzler rather than a strategy game; in many cases, there's only the one path to survival.

The two hardest levels in Advance are "Kanbei's Error?", that level which is trivially easy in the starting campaign because the enemy base is on an island with no way to transport troops off it, and the bonus Andy vs. Eagle mission (IIRC called "Rivals").

Kanbei's Error in particular is a complete nightmare of trial and error: the basic issue is that there is only one correct sequence for something like the first four turns, and under Fog of War, you don't have enough information to work out where it is. Thus, you need to spend tens of attempts merely trying to determine by experiment enough about the enemy placement to be able to complete the level. (The base is still there, and still pointless, but it mostly doesn't matter; the predeployed units are bad enough.) If this sort of thing sounds like fun to you, play Advance Campaign; I know I didn't find it too obnoxious, but I'm weird (and also someone who dabbles in level design for puzzle games, so…). If it doesn't sound like fun to you, well most of Advance Campaign is like that only less so.

The bonus mission, I remember less about, because I only played it once (having learned about its existence online). It's a more "normal" level, less puzzly, but brutally hard in terms of what an Advance Wars level can be like.


Incidentally, I'm torn about the Advance Wars series, because all four games are the best at something in their own right, and none of the games ever does everything right at once. AW1 really nails how War Room should work, for instance, and I love the way that CO portraits show (over the top) emotions during combat. Also, the way you get a choice between the same three COs (Andy/Max/Sami) in nearly every mission has an interesting depth in its own right; you get to really learn the differences between them, and for campaign play, they're quite neatly balanced. This probably isn't the perfect way to do CO Select, but it's better than the other series entries (the only thing that comes close is the boss levels from AW2, which are probably the best CO Select implementation in the series, but there aren't enough of them).

I know it gets a lot of flak, but I really liked Dual Strike. A lot of its systems are over the top, but you can opt not to use them and still win by pure strategy. And what makes it fun for me is the sheer amount of content it has, all of which is pretty good. Featuring such a huge roster of COs is nice even if it's almost impossible to balance them, and the War Room in particular lets you challenge yourself a lot.

Plus, I felt like most of its other DS additions (2nd fronts, the new units) were really good.