Battalion Wars Is An Excellent Third Person/Strategy Hybrid But Lacks Some Key Elements That Will Be Improved In BWii
The gameplay in Battalion Wars is sort a mix between a RTS and Third Person Shooter. The shooter elements are obvious. You see your guy, you can move him around, you controll when he should shoot. When he dies though it's not game over. Here is where the RTS elements come in. You can command your units (which I'll get to in a moment) to capture command posts, follow you, defend the area, or assault a particular enemy. The units include basic Rifle grunts, heavy machine gunners called Assault units, Light Tanks, Heavy Tanks, Light and Heavy Recon (jeeps with machine guns), the all powerful Battlestation (a big freakin' tank), Mortar Veterans (then shoot mortar in order to lure enemies out of their hiding positions), Missile Vets (anti-air infantry), Bazooka Vets, Flame (or Acid Gas) Vets, Anti-Air vehicles, helicopters called Gunships, Fighters, Bombers, STRATO Destroyers (your all purpose flying unit), and transport copters (though to my knowledge you never play as one.) The strategy remains with what units to leave AI controlled and what to manually control. Fortunately for you the AI for your units are for the most part smart. Very rarely do they mess up by diving into sulfur pits or drowning. The AI are also really smart and know how to get under your skin. Especially with the Iron Legion who have an infinite number of Gunships at their disposal. You'll be here a while.
Now as far as the game's story goes, you are the Western Frontier. Your enemies the Tundran Empire have a new leader, Marshall Nova. He wants peace. But those who want peace obtain it from war. His father ,Tsar Gorgi, uses his own personal troops to launch an offensive against the Western Frontier and the world is at war again. Soon Tsar Gorgi goes to beg help from Kaiser Vlad from Xylvania. Xylvania basically backstabs the Tsar and bombs both the Tundrans and the Western Frontier. Now we are exiting the Cold War sim and going to the WWWII sim. The Frontier is basically the US. The Tundrans are Russia, and Xylvania are German. But there's more. For help in this war you turn to Japan, I mean the Solar Empire who are by far the coolest army in this game. They have sci-fi weapons and futuristic looking tanks. Then there's the Iron Leigon which is like Nazi Germany and they have outdated weapons and such. But they're zombies so they have the power of being undead. So they're the hardest enemies in the games.
The graphics while not supporting progressive scan, are top notch for the GameCube. The semi cel-shading and quirky animation make you feel good about viciously obliterating all that stand in your path.
The game has sound. It sounds nice. The military themes make you feel ready for the battle ahead. There are noises that confirm when you make commands such as a whistle to signal the selected troops to follow you.
The replay value is the huge drawback to the game. Not only can the game be completed in less that 4 hours, there's no multi-player. While is is true that you won't spend a lot of time with the game you will be repeating missions for three reasons. First you will fail. You will fail a lot. You will repeat the same mission several times to advance through it. Second you will repeat missions to overall do better. Why you ask? Because doing overall well on each of the four parts of the campaign will unlock bonus missions where you play as the other armies. The third is that beating those bonus missions are hard. They are even harder then the main missions.
All in all Battalion Wars is worth the ten bucks that it costs. Plus once you beat this brilliant game you'll be more than ready for the Wii enhanced sequel. See you on Wi-Fi.