Advance Wars’ slick reboot makes 20 years of trouble melt away

Before the Fire Emblem games claimed the crown as Nintendo’s premier turn-based strategy game, there was Advance Wars. First released in the United States in a catastrophic moment – on September 10, 2001 – Progress wars was a continuation of a series born on Nintendo’s Famicom, but seemed perfectly at home on the then-new Game Boy Advance. The lengthy, turn-based combat was ideal for picking up, playing, and pausing the GBA.

But Advance Wars fans haven’t seen a new entry in the series since 2008 Advance Wars: Days of Ruina Nintendo DS game that took the series’ cute, colorful combat in a much darker direction.

Thanks to WayForward, developer of Shantae and River City Girls, a new generation of Nintendo fans has the chance to experience Advance Wars in a sleek, remade collection known (somewhat awkwardly) as Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp. The Switch duology brings back the charming, cartoonish roots of Advance Wars and delivers the slickest versions of the first two GBA games.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp like the more popular Fire Emblem games, is composed of turn-based combat on grid-based maps, where players build and command military units across land, sea, and air. Players strategically move infantry, tanks, planes, submarines, and battleships to take control of cities and factories, as part of an international conflict. Missions often play out like chess matches, where players (and their enemy) have a set number of units and shared goals: destroy the opposing army, capture their headquarters, or meet some other card-specific victory condition. Combat in Advance Wars is slow and methodical, but thanks to a number of variables to consider, such as terrain, fog of war, and the special skills of commanding officers (COs), they are rarely boring or predictable.

Unlike some strategy games, there isn’t a frenzied collection of resources – cities give players money every day to spend on new units, and factories and airports, if present on a map, provide reinforcements. Instead, players must be more mindful of shot distances, ranges of movement, terrain advantages, and the strengths and weaknesses of individual units. For example, a tank is highly vulnerable to bombers, but those aircraft are vulnerable to anti-aircraft units. Infantry can easily move through forests and mountains and capture structures, but they are no match for tanks or helicopters. Short-range units must position themselves beyond firing range of artillery and rocket launchers. Submarines can be powerful stealth units, but the ability to dive underwater and out of sight means they eat up fuel. As you delve further into the battles of Advance Wars, the strategic depth begins to show.

Further layering the game’s intricacies are the COs: cartoonish, archetypal characters with passive strengths and weaknesses, and can unleash special abilities once they’ve charged them up. Restart boot camp introduces each CO at a comfortable pace, starting with Andy and Max, respectively, an inexperienced young CO who can magically repair units, and a beefy, confident veteran who can give his units an attack boost. Enemy COs – which can be played in later missions and in the game’s Versus mode – have even more powerful abilities, such as Olaf’s Blizzard, a blizzard that inhibits movement, or Eagle’s Lightning Strike, which essentially gives him two turns in one. Some skills may feel overwhelmed or unbalanced, but Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is not particularly difficult; you can often limp your way to victory. There are two difficulty levels: the easy Casual setting and the more challenging Classic setting, if you find your enemies pushovers. The game’s questionable AI certainly makes its share of stupid mistakes, just as it did in the early 2000s.

WayForward and Nintendo dramatically improved the look of the first two Advance Wars games, turning the battlefield into something akin to a tabletop war game, where action figures and brightly colored toys battle bloodlessly. However, there is a gulf between the cel-shaded, pleasantly cartoonish COs and the tacky toys they battle. The animations that accompany COs unleashing their special powers, while nicely animated, slow down combat to an annoying degree. But the overall shine and presentation is hard to fault here; this is a very nice update of two 20 year old games, and the charming personalities of the game commanders have only improved.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a comprehensive package. It features two full-story campaigns spanning dozens of missions (although only the first Progress wars campaign is unlocked from the start), online multiplayer battles against friends, local multiplayer, and a War Room where players can play and replay individual scenarios. There’s even a custom map designer with a dead-simple set of tools for creating and sharing custom battlefields. For newbies, it’s a huge amount of content; for returning Advance Wars fans, it’s a highly polished way to replay dozens of familiar scenarios. After hundreds of hours of playing Progress wars And Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising on a long commute two decades ago, Restart boot camp felt like rewatching a classic remastered movie – I knew all the moves, all the beats, but it was a comforting replay nonetheless.

The new Advance Wars, like the original, comes at an odd time. Nintendo seemed to recognize this last year when, after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it delayed Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp indefinitely. But the toy-like soldiers that exaggerately stomp cities into submission and cartoon characters that are wiped out by artillery fire feel disconnected from the real-life war that made Nintendo pause in 2022. In other words, it’s less unpleasant than you might think to have fun with an urban military war game right now. If anything, Advance Wars’ return feels like a link to a simpler time, enhanced with age and reverence for a long-ignored, still-great franchise.

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp will be released on April 21 on Nintendo switch. The game was reviewed using a pre-release download code from Nintendo. Vox Media has partnerships. These do not affect editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find additional information on Polygon’s Ethics Policy here.