ic-games Review - Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising - Reviews, Previews and Interviews for PC, Xbox 360, PS2, PS3 and Wii

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Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

Information
Reviewer: Andy Carmichael
Developer: Nintendo
Publisher: Nintendo
Reviewed: Gameboy Advance
Genre: Strategy/RPG
UK Release: 03rd Oct 2004
Article Date: 10th Jul 2004
Difficulty: Medium
Retail Price:
Price Comparison:
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Score Breakdown

Experience:
Game Play:
Graphics:
Sound:
Overall Score: 91%

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Pros

Simple yet challenging,

Lifespan

Cons

Repeat scenario

Whenever you hear the words ‘strategy game’ in connection with a console someone will probably try and convince you that it’s like that 3d chess they play in Star Wars. Challenging and intellectual, yet at the same time cool and exciting. Well mostly that’s a load of old bollocks – if titles were like board games then there’d be a lot of bored teenagers around. On a handheld though it’s slightly different, the rattle of a train or stop-start of a bus may make some sort of turn based approach quite appealing. Throw in some high explosives, heavy artillery and heinous commanders and you have a winner – a kind of chess for the next generation.

Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising follows hard on the heels of the surprise popular hit ‘Advance Wars’ (yes, ok - you could have guessed that.) The ‘Black Hole’ refers to the invasion of your green and pleasant land by the massed ranks of villainous stormtroopers. Taking the role of various commanders in an imagined allied force you must battle against the evil axis through a series of maps and localised set-pieces. Basically you are given a map, consisting of geographical features; hills, rivers, forests, and line up on one side with the enemy usually on the other. The aim of the battle may not always be to obliterate your rival, it may be the strategic capture of a feature or destruction of some dastardly new weapon, occasionally it will be time constricted – pretty much all as is in war, often unfair very rarely accompanied by love.

Playing the game via the story mode you get the usual spurious nonsense from various talking heads, giving the impression of a flowing campaign moving from battlefield to battlefield, under the command of a variety of characters (some of them make MacArthur look like a librarian.) After quite a short while you’ll be pressing the start button as quickly as possible through this pre-amble but the choice of leader, and sometimes you get one, occasionally you have to elect a pair, is quite important as within the battle rules they can unleash a ‘special power’ to influence the outcome of the action. In some cases it may be enhanced repair ability, others have more destructive forces, however I get ahead of myself – you need to know how the combatants operate.

Employing a range of personnel and metalwork you have quite simple movement and fire rules. A standard force can move (variously depending on unit) and then fire once adjacent to the enemy. An indirect unit can only do one or the other, but have far larger zones of influence. Sometimes you start the battle with all these units on the board and must work with what you’ve got, other scenarios require you to buy and build your army. This isn’t Command and Conquer though, you earn money by possessing buildings (which can be captured) and then you just look on the shopping list for a suitable killing machine. Of course there’s a wee bit more to it than that but nothing that can’t be picked up within a few minutes and the modest tutorial intro. The simplicity is the key to the game, it doesn’t ask you to collect resources, or invest in R and D, or over complicate the types of armour – just land, sea and air and half a dozen units to command. The matching together of their collective offensive abilities is perfect and there is real decision making to make else they come off worse in a firefight (that by the way is an undemanding 10 v 10 power countdown, a hefty tank likely to end up reducing infantry to 1 and so on.) The only obvious weakness (although some would see it as a strength) is the lacking ‘random factor of war’ element in all this – by and large the big guy wins and he who fires first ends up less dead – there’s none of that ‘for want of a horse-shoe nail’ stuff here.

Graphically it’s spot on. By that I mean it’s judged to perfection for the kind of game it is and console it’s appearing on. It won’t win any Turner prizes for the depth of its artwork but its big and colourful, the units are nicely detailed, easy to find and manage, and the maps well proportioned. Simply there’s nothing to distract you from the action, it does what’s required and leaves the stage to the others. Similar the sound, you won’t think you’ve suddenly wandered into the Somme on a bad day but the music and effects isn’t irritating or diversionary. Solid stuff, the backbone of the effort, not sure how much it had to do with the playing fields of Eton though.

So what you’ll probably want to know then is how long will this entertain me for? How many terminally dull journeys will it alleviate? The answer is dozens, possibly hundreds. Despite not having a choice of difficulties the curve of the battles is perfect. I’ve played very few games that can boast a near perfect balance between challenge and accessibility. It’s all the more surprising as if you fail a scenario you simply replay it and the starting positions don’t change. This gives you the foresight of the enemy’s weapons and likely introductions but still you can find yourself attempting to win by the slenderest of margins. I really don’t know how as you don’t feel like you’re in a game of multi-dimensional strategy and yet the difference between electing to advance your rockets or fire them now can be enormous. Nor is it trial and error – I played one battle for an hour and half,twice and yet only won when I approached it completely differently – a victory wrapped up in twenty minutes. Fortunately, you can save during an action so don’t worry about needing to go round the central line again to end the level, you will have some epic struggles and come away from the machine feeling like you’ve really achieved something.

In addition to the story/campaign mode (which can be run through twice) there are maps to unlock for a versus battle and link mode. You also have the option of designing maps for said battles, although the customisation of the participants is a largely sideshow action. These all add to the longevity, but in truth you may not need to think about them for a number of weeks, if not months, such is the involvement in the main game. I can’t attest for whether people will be playing this in hundreds of years hence but just think how nice it would be should Kasparov come out of retirement for an Advance Wars face-off, I reckon I’d kick his butt.

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