TL;DR – Wargroove is an enjoyable spiritual successor to the Advance Wars (AW) series that features some twists on the formula which make it different enough to justify buying. While the game isn’t perfect it has a truly vast amount of content on offer, with a campaign that has a solid difficulty curve culminating in some challenging missions that require you to fully understand how the systems work. When you combine this well structured gameplay with the game’s charming visual style and ridiculous value proposition I have no trouble highly recommending this game.
Wargroove was one of those indie darlings that appeared out of nowhere and quickly made a name for itself, mainly by successfully aping a previously dormant series and appealing to it’s fanbase. Yet unlike most of the indie games that try to do this, the game itself is actually very refined and has enough changes to the formula that make it an enjoyable experience without just being a mere clone. Although in all fairness it is very similar to Advance Wars, to the point that at times I was getting tripped up as I was forgetting that the range for artillery archers worked slightly differently. That isn’t a bad thing however, as being similar to a great strategy game is a pretty solid strategy and one that appears to have paid off for Wargroove to the point that we’re now getting a sequel at some point in the relatively near future.
To quickly recap for anyone who hasn’t played an Advance Wars game, in Wargroove you are the commander of an army with a variety of ground, air and sea units that you can purchase at different price points. To purchase these units, you need to obtain funds from various buildings which are dotted around the map (that you view from a top-down perspective) and these buildings can only be captured by infantry units. Some of these buildings are bases, ports and airports towers that can be captured which let you train new units and as such these are crucially important to control. All of the units you can purchase are effective against certain other units, while being weak to others, ensuring that you need a somewhat balanced variety of troops to avoid getting #rekt. To make matters more complicated, the maps are split into tiles with each tile having a terrain type and these terrain types provide both defensive boosts and movement penalties to your units. As those units also have a different range of movement and attack per turn, maps will often feature natural chokepoints and areas that are difficult to traverse. Finally each army is led by a commander unit who has a power that increases as they’re near the fray (much like the last Advance Wars game), with these powers varying depending on which commanding officer you’ve picked. To give an example, Mercia the protagonist of the campaign’s plot has the ability to heal all units near her by 5 HP points (out of a max of 10).
With that out of the way, you’ll probably be curious as to what Wargroove has changed. The most obvious thing, aside from it taking place in a fantasy setting as opposed to a contemporary one, is that you no longer have to worry about ammunition. Units can attack and attack and attack until the end of the world, which can be helpful for both you and the enemy. There are also some unit types that have been radically changed from their counter-parts, with recon units having been replaced with war dogs which are similarly speedy but are much cheaper at the expense of having the lowest defence in the game. The capturing system has also been changed, with units being able to capture unclaimed buildings in one turn. The catch is that claimed buildings have their own HP pool and ability to damage attackers, so you can only capture enemy buildings once you’ve battered them down and dealt with counter attacks. When you capture a building it gains the equivalent of half the capturing units HP for free, but then it needs to gradually replenish itself at a rate of 1HP per turn. This then becomes important as the healing/repair system has been changed, with units now taking HP from the building that they heal at and of course they can’t heal more HP than the building has. Plus units can’t occupy buildings by sitting on them anymore, instead to heal you need to be next to them and new units you’ve bought will be spawned beside the building not on top of it. As such there is a bit of a risk reward system going on, as frontline buildings can provide a needed dose of health for a strong unit, but they’ll take time to replenish their own HP which makes them weak to attackers. Alongside the new building changes, Commanding Officers now can’t switch from unit to unit but are instead always on the battlefield and the game ends if they die. Yet the game also encourages you to use them as they’re powerful and their abilities can have a big impact in swaying a battle. Speaking of abilities, some units have abilities such as the Shamans (anti-air) which let them spend money to heal units within a short radius. Last but certainly not least, units have the ability to inflict crits upon their targets if specific conditions are met. To give some examples, swordsmen (infantry) crit when they are next to their commanders, shamans crit when on terrain that provides a +3 or more defence bonus and trebuchets (rockets) crit when engaging targets at their maximum range. These crits are very, very important as they’re often able to allow you to destroy an enemy unit in one hit.
So it’s fair to say that Wargroove has taken an existing formula and added to it, without neglecting any of the features that made Advance Wars so enjoyable. This includes the AI which is constantly capable of putting up a decent fight, but never one that feels unwinnable (especially once you learn their quirks, such as their LOVE of attacking your Commander). Fortunately you’ll have plenty of time to learn these quirks as you’ve not only got a skirmish mode, but you also have a fully fledged campaign and a handful of other modes (more on them later). The campaign itself features 7 Acts, each of which has 3 main missions and then the roughly the same number of optional side missions. These optional missions are often harder than the main ones, but you’ll need to beat them all if you want the true ending. This is because the final mission of Act 7 is an Epilogue mission and to unlock it you’ll need to have earned 100 stars, but each mission only provides a maximum of 3 depending on the post-mission rank you received. As such even if you A-Ranked every main mission, you’d still be 40 stars short. Fortunately I found that the turn-limits for receiving an A-Rank were fairly generous and as such it wasn’t until I got to the final two Acts that I was failing to consistently get them. And by that point in the game I’d already been working my way through the side-missions anyway, so unlocking the Epilogue didn’t cause me too much trouble. As for the campaign itself it’s fairly enjoyable and much like the Advance Wars series, the first dozen or so missions act as a gradual tutorial to all of the game’s concepts. In a nod to the first AW game, you basically go around the world getting in slapfights with various headstrong commanders from other factions before they realise you’re actually a pretty cool guy and join you. It does have some challenge towards the end, especially with the pre-deploy missions where the number of units you have is limited, but there isn’t anything as stupidly punishing as the final missions in the AW games.
And honestly while the game looks great and plays great, it’s the writing and characterisations if anything that give me a bit of pause. I was kind of hoping for something like Fire Emblem 7 or Advance Wars, but the tone is a bit different and everything just feels… for want of a better term, so heckin’ wholesome 100 big chungus. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that a developer that has multiple office dogs and an office snake has written such an aggressive upbeat game, but it does feel a little weird at times. I found the AW characters largely enjoyable and while the Wargroove characters are equally as one-note, they’re just not as cool. I think it’s due to the fact that in AW every character (except Colin, but that’s his character) is very confident while being laidback, whereas in Wargroove every character is very supportive and friendly. It’s a small difference and not really a big part of the game, but I just wanted to note this as it’s basically the only thing that I think Wargroove does worse. Especially as the campaign has a mini-cutscene for every mission and while they are skippable, they’ve had a lot of time and attention put into them (plus every character has multiple pages of backstory as told via the in-game codex).
With that one criticism out of the way, I’ll just re-iterate that Wargroove has an overwhelming amount of content and as such you don’t really need to worry about the campaign’s storyline that much. In fact you could get hundreds of hours of playtime while barely interacting with it, as not only does the game have a skirmish mode but you can also straight-up download custom campaigns from within the game that have been made by other players. Plus you’ll be able to create your own maps, so if you were so inclined you could just rely on the community to keep you entertained. Of course the campaign does unlock new COs and other content, so you’ll probably want to play it anyway, but you don’t have to. Speaking of which the game also offers two other main modes of playing through it, in the form of the Arcade mode and the Puzzle mode. The Arcade mode is unlocked at the end of the 1st Act of the campaign and involves playing 5 skirmish battles back-to-back in one of three difficulties (easy, normal or hard). These difficulties determine how much gold the enemy gets from their buildings, with the respective values being x0.5, x1 and x2 in line with the difficulty setting you chose. Then you’ve got the puzzle mode which unlocks once you’ve cleared the 3rd Act of the Campaign and features 25 maps, each of which give you a single turn to complete an objective (generally winning the stage). It goes without saying that these maps can be fairly challenging to figure out, as you’ll need to make every move perfectly lest your best laid plan fall apart. Unlike the Arcade mode however there isn’t any penalty for failure, so you’re free to keep playing these maps again and again until you can figure out what the optimal methods are.
So to conclude, Wargroove is an enjoyable TBS experience that is heavily inspired by Advance Wars without falling into the classic indie trap of merely cloning an existing franchise. Instead it offers not only a vast amount of content, but also plenty of twists and new ideas on the established formula which make it a great game to play. In spite of the relatively weak characterisation, this is a game with a lot of heart and effort put into it and this hard work is constantly on display in the form of different game modes, high quality sprite work and a well balanced difficulty curve. Ultimately Wargroove is a game that I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend to anyone, whether they’re a TBS fan or not, but I would say that it’s the best AW inspired game I’ve yet to play. As such I hope you’ll consider giving this game and try and will join me in looking forward to the sequel