User Rating: 9.5 | Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising GBA
Everyone begged for it, and now we got it. The surprise GBA hit of 2001 received almost unanimous praise from every gamer who laid their eyes and hands upon it. Many still believe Advance Wars to be the best GBA game, even in the face of recent games such as Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow. Perhaps the only game that could possibly be better than AW is its sequel. Well, the sequel’s here, and guess what—it is. Advance Wars 2 improves on almost everything imaginable. Campaign mode is much more entertaining; the Black Hole army is out in full force, complete with their own unit graphics (no more Orange Star cloning), four new Black Hole CO’s, and defensive structures that limit your movement until you find a way to get around them, or destroy them outright. All of the old CO’s are back, and they’ve been tweaked mostly for the better. Some will dislike the weakening of Max, while others will argue that it just makes AW2 more balanced (either way, he’s still the king of tank rushing). If you thought Sami was weak before, then you’ll like her new super CO power, which allows her to capture properties in a single day, regardless of a unit’s remaining HP! Even Olaf, an underused and underrated CO, should get more playtime because of the usefulness of his super CO power. The addition of new CO’s and second-tier CO powers more than compensates for the lack of new units. I believe Greg when he said that you really can’t add more units, otherwise you would just end up with variations of the standard units, which is redundant. However, I don’t believe that Intelligent Systems have exhausted all of the possibilities. If they need inspiration, they could always scour the Internet for ideas...people (such as myself) like to come up with their own creations for new units and CO’s, and there are some really great ideas that could be implemented in a future game without changing the core gameplay or messing up the balance. Great game ideas don’t always come from established game developers. But I digress. AW2’s game modes are the same as they were in the previous game, save for a few extensions. Design Maps, for example, is now Design Room, where you can create your own maps, or edit the colours of your favourite CO’s (yes, you can make Olaf look like Santa). Creating your own maps has been slightly improved; you can now build pipes and missile silos. Sadly, you still can’t adjust the map size, and even worse, the developers don’t allow you to play with the toys found only in Campaign mode: the cannons. AW2’s graphics are pretty much the same as they were, except some of the terrain has a slightly darker look. The rehashed graphics will give some gamers the impression that AW2 is little more than an expansion pack, but it really isn’t. The animated portraits during combat have been removed, as if AW2 tries to be a more serious game--and it does. However, the game still has plenty of silly-in-a-good-way moments (“Sonja, I can’t find my other sock”). The sound is a significant improvement; while the old CO’s retain their original theme music, the new CO tunes are quite good, as are the CO power/super CO power tunes, of which Black Hole has their own. Few turn-based strategy games are as entertaining and as replayable as Advance Wars 2. It’s a serious contender for GBA game of the year, and it’ll likely win the award by many publications and Web sites, unless another surprise hit comes out of nowhere like the original Advance Wars did 2 years ago.
