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Wargroove review thread (85% opencritic)
- Thread starter SpottieO
- Start date
Oh yeah. Used to play with my best mate at our first job at this go kart place. Spend the evening passing the GBA back and forth and save for later.
Is that people are upset about? It's better to play through the entire mission without saving.
Metro Gamecentral review is up, sounds good overall (8/10):
https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/30/wargroove-review-advance-wars-indie-edition-8414540/
Sum-up:
In Short: The best Advance Wars game never made and while there are a few flaws there's also plenty of new ideas and a mountain of extra content.
Pros: Extremely accessible and deep strategy action. Lengthy story content and lots of additional modes and options. Local multiplayer and online cross-play adds enormous longevity.
Cons: The size of the levels becomes too big too soon, affecting the pacing of stages and the frustration at losing. Retro visuals seem unnecessary and can become difficult to parse at times.
looking at the review the problem they had with the graphics are:
It may be an unavoidable restriction of its low budget but we really don't like the retro 2D artwork. As with everything else it's clearly trying to mimic Advance Wars but most of the sprites are fairly ugly and, more importantly, can be difficult to recognise in a pinch. This is particularly true of the info screen which has a little bar showing which units your current one is weak or strong against and they're almost impossible to make out in both handheld and TV mode.
I do agree that (at least the large character sprites) are ugly and nowhere near IS's old GBA/DS ones.
https://metro.co.uk/2019/01/30/wargroove-review-advance-wars-indie-edition-8414540/
Sum-up:
In Short: The best Advance Wars game never made and while there are a few flaws there's also plenty of new ideas and a mountain of extra content.
Pros: Extremely accessible and deep strategy action. Lengthy story content and lots of additional modes and options. Local multiplayer and online cross-play adds enormous longevity.
Cons: The size of the levels becomes too big too soon, affecting the pacing of stages and the frustration at losing. Retro visuals seem unnecessary and can become difficult to parse at times.
looking at the review the problem they had with the graphics are:
It may be an unavoidable restriction of its low budget but we really don't like the retro 2D artwork. As with everything else it's clearly trying to mimic Advance Wars but most of the sprites are fairly ugly and, more importantly, can be difficult to recognise in a pinch. This is particularly true of the info screen which has a little bar showing which units your current one is weak or strong against and they're almost impossible to make out in both handheld and TV mode.
I do agree that (at least the large character sprites) are ugly and nowhere near IS's old GBA/DS ones.
Developer post, mid-battle saves
Just want to clarify some of the confusion in this thread, you can absolutely exit the game and resume back in again, your current progress will be resumed. If you lose a mission however, you will have to restart it from the beginning.
Disappointing how quickly this misinformation spiraled the whole topic. Put this quote above the reviews and let's move on.
Come on Friday!!
Thanks heaps for clarifying! Makes one question some of these reviews really.
I didn't think about turn notifications on switch. That kind of sucks. I wonder if an email notification system could be setup. I'd much rather prefer that anyways since I'll most likely split my time between pc and switch.
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Yeah but let's say a big map takes, idk, 40 minutes. One massive appeal of Advance Wars to me was that the game took merely a few seconds to load, and another second to get back into a map. From the DS being off to being in a map in AW took less than 10 seconds in total. You could turn it on, play for 15 minutes, then turn it off and do your thing. Sleep mode is awesome, but if I want to switch to another game, I have to close the game I'm playing. It's not solving the issue of short-form satisfaction.
But yeah I want to clarify that I do absolutely love sleep mode and if you're not planning on switching games then it's a perfect option of course
I've added this to Threadmarks for reference, thanks Supernorn.
I wonder if, as someone mentioned above, it's a means of preventing save-scumming.
edit: NEVERMIND!
I agree with you too. The terrain looks fine, but the units can be hard to distinguish at a glance. I can definitely relate to those string of icons in the strong against, weak against screen being impossible to parse. It will definitely get better with familiarity to the units, but it definitely doesn't pop out like an AW screen would -- partly because tanks, anti-airs, infantry, etc. have very different silhouettes compared to dudes with swords, dude with spears, dude with bow, dude with scrolls, etc.
It's a single-player game so idk, if people want to cheat at their own game then I'd just let them. You're not hurting anyone else's experience ^^'
Yeah I can confirm this, although the game doesn't tell you - just says "Are you sure that you want to exit?"
Might benefit from telling the player that their game will be suspended. (Also, an Undo button would be nice JUST SAYING)
Sounds fair enough to me. I have a small question about local multiplayer in particular for the Switch.
You can share a controller with another person with the same system but can you use 2 controllers.
Also is there 4 player maps?
Good point on vehicle silhouettes vs differing equipment, I agree.
Can't wait to start this, play the campaign then start designing one.
This is a small nit about reviews entirely unrelated to Wargroove itself, but I wish people would stop calling the first GBA Advance Wars the 'first' game in the series.
Note to reviewers: the Wars series has existed since the Famicom! :P
Note to reviewers: the Wars series has existed since the Famicom! :P
Good to know! Gotta wait until Friday sadly, but can't wait to get my hands on it when I do. Looks great.
Actually didn't know this. Thanks for sharing.
Sweet, glad to see it reviewing well. Not sure if I'll pick it up on Friday, but this will be my next Switch game for sure.
Watched the gamexplain review and the difficulty options look really good. I always find that certain missions or types of missions just slay me. I don't know if I ever finished Advance Wars on the DS because I was just so bad at the game. So many unit types and I often struggle to remember the interactions between them all. Going to watch a stream or two on Thursday and make my mind up then.
Good thing that midsave thing got clarified or else we would've had a meaningless conversation for 4 more pages.
I found the final mission on all four Advance Wars games to be a real struggle. I can't remember which one I finished but it was only one out of the four. Love the games and the intricate unit balance though.
My god, I am so stupid, I have been thinking it's the 1st all day and waiting for it to unlock haha
No confirmation but is probably because of cross-play. All other platforms support it at launch.
It was a misinformation. Mid-battle saves are there.
Cool. Don't want to have to leave my PC on.
Do we know if user created campaigns can work in co-op? Does the main campaign?
No but we're assuming they want to get into the crossplay beta program first before releasing more details since crossplay is so heavily emphasized for this game.
While mid-mission saving does open to the opportunity for save-scumming I still think it should be included anyway, especially for those long battles. No one's going to force you to use it (maybe have an in-game achievement or ranking for those that intentionally avoid it).
Midmission saving is in, it's just that losing the mission makes you start that over. Publisher rep came in to correct misinfo
People are just using the same terminology for two different things.
My understanding is that suspend saves are in, but deliberate mid-mission saving (i.e. "savescumming" as a checkpoint/bookmark) isn't in, which is what a lot of reviewers seem to take objection to, since campaign missions can take upwards of an hour.
Restarting such lengthy missions from scratch probably doesn't feel great, especially if reports of trial-and-error ambush mechanics are true. Same-turn ambush spawns were usually hated in the Fire Emblem games that featured them, too.
Was super interested in picking this up until I heard about the same-turn ambushes.
This is a thing why?
This is a thing why?
This is a good clarification. I'm asking for deliberate mid-mission saves (that I can revert back to) and/or checkpoints.
As much as Wargroove borrows from Advance Wars and Fire Emblem, it seems that the game might have also borrowed some of the more annoying battle design elements that have appeared in some of the games.