Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp is a complete graphical remake of two classic turn-based strategy games, Advance Wars and Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising, originally released on the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s, a series that had gone without a brand-new entry for nearly a generation. The player commands the armies of warring factions such as Orange Star or Blue Moon across a series of missions set on a clear square grid, managing income from captured cities and factories, building units ranging from infantry through tanks to planes and ships, and exploiting terrain advantages and the rock-paper-scissors-style matchups between unit types.

Each turn is thus a small economic balancing act: money from cities never covers everything, cheap infantry can capture buildings but can't stop tanks on their own, and forests or mountains boost defense enough that a poorly planned attack can cost half an army. A distinctive spice of the series are the CO commanders with unique passive bonuses and powerful, one-time-activatable abilities called CO Powers, which can turn around even a seemingly hopeless battle. The remake completely reworked the visual style into chunky, colorful 3D graphics reminiscent of toys, while keeping exactly the same content, missions, and balance as the original games; fully animated battle sequences and voiced commander lines were added.

The release was not without complications — the game was delayed by a year at the last moment due to the sensitivity of the military-conflict theme at the time of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The campaign offers dozens of missions across two interconnected campaigns and a full multiplayer mode for battles against friends or AI, complemented by a custom map editor. Re-Boot Camp introduced new generations of players to a genre now represented by only a handful of console titles, and delighted longtime fans with its faithfulness to the original, even though some of them, after years of waiting, would have preferred an entirely new installment.