Battalion Wars 2 Hands-On

What's the one thing Kuju's quirky strategy action game Battalion Wars was missing? If you answered "online multiplayer," has Nintendo got a Wii game for you! Battalion Wars 2 is on the way with Wii-specific controls and, yes, full Internet multiplayer. We got to try out that multiplayer at a recent Nintendo press event and found it to be pretty much exactly what we expected (and hoped for) after playing the original on the Cube. The demo didn't have much to it--only a simple head-to-head versus mode was available--but we found the mechanics and visual style quite familiar, veterans of the original as we are.

The demo match plopped us down into a lengthy battlefield with two armies--the Iron Legion and the Solar Empire--on each end. We took control of one side, and found our squad composed of a few rifle-wielding grunts, a flamethrower dude, a couple of antitank guys with bazookas, and a big fat tank. Like on the GameCube, we could switch between these units on our heads-up display with the D pad, and then hold A to switch to a new unit type. At that point, we were free to control the unit with standard analog-stick controls and a lock-on for easy aiming and firing. We couldn't direct individual units to move to specific points on the map, but we could put our squad in either "wait" or "follow" mode in order to make them...um, wait or follow.

Our demo was time-limited, and victory was contingent on simply scoring the most points from kills. All of our unit types respawned indefinitely throughout the match, so it was pretty much a nonstop fracas until we hit that end point. However, we saw hints of greater depth even during those few minutes. Each side had a couple of buildings in the demo match, and according to an in-game hint screen, capturing an enemy building like a factory would simultaneously increase our troop resupply rate and decrease that of our enemy. In fact, we pushed all the way to our opponent's final base at the far end of the map and found it guarded by a number of big automated turrets, so there must have been something worth capturing in there.

The latest Advance Wars, Days of Ruin, will eschew that series' trademark silly visual style in favor of a more serious aesthetic that's more consistent with the brutal realities of war. Battalion Wars 2 developer Kuju, however, is sticking to the same candy-coated guns as the first game, based on our demo. All the scrappy little soldiers have the same cartoonlike proportions and exaggerated expressiveness that you remember from the first Battalion Wars, and the previous Advance Wars games, too.

We didn't get to see a lot of Battalion Wars 2, but what we saw looked right in line with the original game's mechanics and spirit. Though Nintendo's scarcely taken the wraps off this one, the game is due out in just about two weeks, so we'll bring you more info--and a final verdict--very soon.