When Kuju Entertainment first announced Battalion Wars, it was unveiled as Advance Wars: Under Fire. Its announcement was somewhat of a wet dream for fans of the Advance Wars series on Game Boy Advance. However, as soon as the media of Under Fire started rolling in, something quickly became apparent. This Nintendo-published title, despite its name, was really very different from Intelligent System’s popular GBA series. For some, this might have been a disappointment. After all, the Game Boy games featured a top-down, two-dimensional view of a turn-based board in which players relied heavily on strategy. Kuju’s game, meanwhile, was a 3D third-person action game that really didn’t resemble Advance Wars.

Later, at E3 2005, the developer changed the game’s title to Battalion Wars, saying that it didn’t consider Battalion Wars to be a part of the “Advance Wars” series itself. With this name change, we felt a little better about the game. After all, with the name Advance Wars attached to it, we couldn’t help but compare the game to Intelligent System’s series, and, with no offense to the E3 demos of old, the difference between Intelligent System’s games and Battalion Wars was as clear as day and night. However, things change. Sometimes for the better.

In fact, that seems to be the case with Battalion Wars. When we played the game at E3 2005, we were left slightly turned-off. Controls felt unrefined, gameplay unpolished and everything else rather standard. Truth is, our anticipation for the game quickly faded. However, when we got our hands on the final version of Battalion Wars, we were pretty surprised with the difference of quality between when we last saw it and the game in front of us.

Essentially, everything that was wrong with the run-of-the-mill demo has been fixed. In its place is a polished, challenging and exciting 3D first-person action game with portions of real-time strategy. It’s an enticing and enjoyable mix, too. All in all, Battalion Wars offers some of the most strategy-based gameplay and hectic action on the GameCube. Need to know more? Keep reading.

Features

• Single-player campaign with mixes of real-time strategy and third-person action elements
  
• Tells the story of a global war between two foes that come together to fight against one dangerously large enemy
  
• Over 20 unique missions to complete, each including non-linear mission objectives
  
• Control and command your own army including troops with automatic rifles, rocket launchers, missiles, flamethrowers, and much more
  
• Pilot a number of vehicles such as jeeps, tanks, anti-air vehicles, bombers, helicopters and more
  
• Full voice-acting for all of the game’s FMV and in-game dialogue
  
• Rated T for Teen
  
• Progressive-scan support
  
• 16x9 anamorphic widescreen support
  
• Dolby Pro Logic II support

Enemies Unite
Battalion Wars is cartoony action game with mixes of real-time strategy, but while it’s sometimes difficult to describe what genre it ultimately falls in, it’s essentially a war game. And like all war games, its storyline involves plenty of struggle and conflict.



Battalion Wars

Initially, it tells the story of simple border war between The Western Frontier and Tundran Territories. It’s not until players have completed a handful of missions that the story takes its real form. During the war between these two countries, a nation called Xylvania was annexed by both The Western Frontier and Tundran Territories. Its leader, Kaiser Vlad, however, wants revenge on both nations. Thus he creates his own lethal army called the Chemical Shock Troops. These gas-breathing soldiers are too much for either country to handle on their own so they have to join forces in order to stop Vlad from doing whatever he wants to do with the world as they know it.

A mix of both full motion video (FMV) and in-game dialogue tell this story. Battalion War’s cinematic FMV looks pretty good and is very comic book-esque. Character models feature rounded edges, abstract body shapes and other cartoon characteristics – the general tone being clean and colorful. In addition to delivering great pre-rendered cut-scenes, Kuju Entertainment has made sure that all of the dialogue in the game is voiced by competent actors and actresses. While these voiceovers aren’t out of this world, they do more than get the job done. This work is actually quite good, overall.