Published: 31 Aug 2024
Last updated: 1 Sep 2024
- Develop and Published by: Chucklefish Games
- Released on: 2015
- Genre: Turn Based Strategy, Tactics, Wargame
- Rating: 3.5/5
- Originally written: 7th January 2024
At first blush its medieval themed Advance Wars, given it copies the core gameplay of turn-based tactics, the pixel-art units and combat animations - and so a comparison is rather unavoidable. If you enjoy Advance Wars, you’ll likely enjoy this and vice versa - but make no mistake, this has small but significant changes and deviations to give Wargroove its own twist on the genre and not just be a strict clone. I make note of this deliberately because a lot of complaints and “I wanted to enjoy this game more than I did” seem to derive from these few but impactful changes (myself included!).
These are the changes below:
- CO vs Hero/Commander Unit. - There’s no differences between the factions outside of the Commander units “Groove” power which generally only affects the Commander itself, in contrast to the army-wide buffs that an Advance Wars CO powers usually provide. A secondary effect of having a Commander unit on the battlefield is to double as a win condition, allowing a win without having to capture the HQ or eliminate all units - which can certainly cut down on the time spent on mop-up, winning an already won game.
- Critical hits. - In lieu of passive effects, the Critical hit mechanic is used to create imbalances and asymmetry, and rewards good positioning with extra damage on attack.
- Village/City changes. - While they still serve the primary function of granting gold to recruit units, they function entirely differently. Villages are captured by placing a unit adjacent, they have to be “defeated” before being able to be captured and so can defend themselves, units cannot be placed on top of a village, Villages can heal adjacent units but only transferring health from the Village to the unit. A lot of these changes are positive, taking out a lot of the cheesy camping strategies.
- No combining of units. - A ‘minor’ change but quite dramatic working in tandem with the Village healing changes, means getting the first strike is more important than ever, lest you end up with a 3HP unit which can’t do much. Has some tactical implications too, making chokepoints harder to defend nicely.
- Some other assorted changes. - Some units are rebalanced compared to their Advance Wars counterparts (movement is the most notable), barracks no longer give gold, some units have ‘special’ abilities outside of simple combat (e.g. Alchemist heal on-field), no fuel/ammunition mechanic, Rangers can move and fire on the same turn.
Wargroove is built on a rock solid foundation that Advance Wars synthesised but has some changes which a lot don’t neatly fit into a strict “better vs. worse” category, they’re simply a different take on the genre, and one focused on balanced/“competitive” multiplayer matches emphasising the chess-like aspect (and conversely, de-emphasising the big blowout turns that Advance Wars have).
Despite the multiplayer emphasis, there’s a boatload of single-player content (including an editor and a host of user-created maps), and while the Campaign is pretty meh (in both story and map design), there’s also Arcade, Puzzle (which is very chess-like!), Co-op and the aforementioned user-generated content to play and enjoy.
