GAMEGUIDEDOG.COM IS PROUD to be able to provide the most complete and best online walkthrough strategy game guide for ADVANCE WARS: DAYS OF RUIN WALKTHROUGH GAME STRATEGY GUIDE on the DS Platform.
The greates of all DS games to date, we have the guide and here's more of the scoop! The Campaign mode also integrates a number of "Trial" maps, which are like the War Room maps of old, and pop up away from the general flow of the story missions. These provide a sterner test of your abilities, meaning that existing fans can get into the trickier stuff earlier on, while first-timers can return to them later once their skills have developed - aided by some well-illustrated in-game tutorial screens, too. There is also a Free Battle mode, where you can play on the game's maps right from the start, and a Design Room for creating your own battlefields, even setting up the enemy AI.
Then of course there is the wireless multiplayer. Locally it supports up to four players, and over the Internet you can go one on one with your friends. There's even voice communication using the microphone, which actually works quite well. Not many of our friends were online when we played through the game (it only launched in the US, where it's known as Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, on Monday, and isn't out here until Friday, 25th January), but the games we did manage to engage in didn't appear to suffer from any debilitating lag.
The in-game tutorials are quick, and quickly skipped if you know what you're doing. However, for all the positive changes and additions, the decision to redesign the game in greys, browns and other grumpy colours and put the story in the hands of a jarringly earnest and slightly depressive goth blogger is bound to cause consternation in some quarters. It's not just the tone of the writing: the graphics are a bit Command & Conquer: Red Alert (with a fairly useless 'zoom' element that reduces your range of vision too much for my liking); the bits where the COs chat are illustrated with forgettable, Fire Emblem-style character drawings that brighten up when someone speaks; the soundtrack (main menu music aside, perhaps) is pretty generic; and the menus, for that matter (thanks, brackets), appear to have been an afterthought.
That makes a big difference, too - the important statistics and visual explanations of which unit-types your current charge is effective or ineffective against are harder to read at a glance, and this can be fatal. It's genuinely bizarre to find ourselves berating Intelligent Systems for a lack of attention to detail, but there we go. You may also run out of game to play quicker than you did before, thanks to a relative lack of unlockables, and the loss of the shop where you could buy new toys.
All of which adds up to an Advance Wars game that we had just as much, if not more fun playing than ever, but one that proves a bit too grimy and unfriendly for our bright and bouncy taste. Fortunately though, Dark Conflict remains hospitable in most of the areas that really matter to its fans and the people finally tempted to give it a go, and the result is probably the better of the two DS versions. It may have lost some of its soul and style, as Oli put it after a few hours in its company last week, but the gameplay has lost very little of its charm, and the result is one of the first really good new DS games of 2008. Cheer up next time though, eh?
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