War Theatre for the Nintendo Switch is a tough hoss of a turn-based game, which harkens back to the day of Dragon Force and Advance Wars, though not quite as perfect as those games. It ups the ante of difficulty, while requiring you to think before you move, or else you’re in for a long day. It’s a challenge, but a welcomed one.
If Dragon Force mated with Advance Wars, then you would have War Theatre.
When I say ‘Dragon Force’, I don’t tread lightly. That is one of Sega Saturn’s crown jewel games, if not THE crown jewel of that generation for that system. It featured strategy and warfare, and combined attributes that cumulated into one anime-art driven game that needs to be remastered. SEGA put down Sonic, put down Yakuza, and get to work on bringing a remastered version of Dragon Force to the market. Please.
Moving on.
Advance Wars is the lighter, Nintendo-friendly version of Dragon Force, though just as powerful in gameplay design. It’s simple enough to jump right into but contains enough gradual difficulty to keep it engaging, something that turn-based games need for longevity. Advance Wars did it all really well. So well, in fact, that I played the hell out of this game on the way to E3 in 2009 (it pretty much took up my entire 4+ hour plane ride). It was my distraction from thinking about how a giant Tylenol of a plane is only kept afloat by lift and proper weight. Let that sink in.
War Theatre takes the best of those worlds and ups the ante a bit by bringing in some true difficulty right out of the gate, while still maintaining that assumption of ease-of-use. In other words, in a normal game of this type, I would have written it off by now, but the challenge War Theatre sets before you is almost comparable to those emotions you would go through with a game made by FromSoftware, where you know it’s going to be difficult, but you’re hellbent on getting through it. It’s not miserable, it’s challenging.
The gameplay design of War Theatre is simple in concept. Your team is given a narrative scenario that puts you either in a defensive or offensive storyline. Your team must capture points on a map, while at the same time building an army to fight off the opposing team. You can win a few ways in this game:
1. You can capture the home base of the other team and declare victory.
2. You can take out the leader of the opposing team, which allots you the win.
Regardless of which way you succeed, the gameplay design is anything but a cinch. The gameplay is built to be as cutthroat as you, if not more, and it starts out right from the get-go letting you know this. For every point you capture or every type of solider/vehicle you build out, you have to think it through because the enemy is either countering it or conquering it. For those of you turn-based fans out there looking for a challenge, you’ve been delivered one. When the enemy lays down an enemy, you have to be thorough on how you counter this, as there is little room for error. This aspect of the game was by far the most challenging when it came to winning a story in the campaign mode. I think my first two victories took about a day or so to achieve, which felt like a remarkable feat once I figured out the strategic learning curve. If you pick a soldier, the enemy might pick a tank. Once they pick a tank, you have to figure out what is best used to counter it, such is the case with picking a blimp to counter that tank. Each vehicle and personnel decision you make must be made methodically and with counter measures always in check. As Sun Tzu put it, ““If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” I can guarantee you that I didn’t know my enemy as much as I knew myself, which resulted in a lot of succumbing. War Theatre is tough, folks, and expects you not to rest on your laurels. It’s not easy to jump into, but the payoff, at least for me, felt like it was worth it. Again, sorta like a FromSoftware game.
As it is with turn-based war games, War Theatre presents a price for each soldier/vehicle you purchase. You have to capture points on the map to gain more coin, which equals out to more options to throw at your enemy. This concept of capture and reward isn’t new for the turn-based genre. To capture a point, you need only move your player over it and select ‘capture’ as for the option in the contextual menu. If a point is already captured, then you have to wait two rounds after capturing it to truly take it. The first round to kick the old crew out, the second round to capture, and, yes, you have to select capture twice. Knowing when to capture something and allot resources to a re-capture is part of the thought process in the gameplay design. You can’t simply take it and feel safe, as you will need reinforcements to protect your capturer. Again, it’s strategic in almost every aspect of decision-making, which makes it a good struggle when it comes to learning and executing the gameplay.
One thing I had a hard time getting used to in the game is how you have to position yourself in a certain way on the map to attack certainly objects. Generally, you would have to be at least a space away from the enemy to attack them, or at least catty-corner with them. It doesn’t seem like a pain until you do it wrong a few times…or 10+ times. I always imagined that attacking things in a turn-based game meant being right up on the enemy to get the most bang for your buck. This isn’t the case with War Theatre. It needs some space and, as a bonus, performs attacks in different ways depending on what soldier/vehicle you’re using. The latter is nice, as it leads back to that strategic necessity mentioned above. The positioning issue is due to my lack of table-top experience, which began and ended with Robotoch/Battletech back in the 80s/90s. Maybe I should pick that back up…nah. It will more than likely feel appropriate to those used to such movements. After awhile, I got it and understood it.
The gameplay design in War Theatre is a methodically built challenge. It will put your patience to the test, but the more you play it, the more you’ll get used to it.
All of the above said, you will have plenty of time to sharpen your skills across two modes, which are campaign and multiplayer.
The campaign mode will certainly be the go-to mode that will show you nearly every type of scenario you’re going to go up against. It initially contains seven stories to play through, each containing its own narrative and objectives. As I mentioned above, the game tries to put narrative design at the forefront of a turn-based game. I can dig that because that particular train of thought was what made Dragon Force special to me in the 90s. Applying a story that is built through gameplay design equals out to motivation to keep playing, even though you might fail multiple times. War Theatre offers up a variety of different flavors in this department, each making the brief character interactions meaningful. For example, playing as a Rat Mother and leading your rat troops into battle is something special, though a little Secret of NIMH for me (scarred as a child from that film, but I believe Don Bluth was out to scar every generation with his generally epic works). The creative characters that contain certain personalities, which lend to the stories in the campaign mode help to sell the game quite a bit. Good stories, even if they’re brief, bring the gamer closer to the action, which is the case with War Theatre. Anyway, you’ll find a solid challenge in the campaign mode, which will prep you for multiplayer action.
On the multiplayer side of the tracks, I don’t have a lot of good experience with that…yet. I am still working on the campaign mode, and still very much learning the ins/outs, so I will have to get back to you about this mode. I do promise to update you, but as it stand it is still solid as the campaign mode, though it depends on your competition.
Shifting over to presentation, the game isn’t anything visually special, probably as you would expect. I’m honestly not concerned about a gorgeous game when it comes to the turn-based genre. The map scenes are nothing outside of what you would expect from the genre, though the cutscenes to the battlefield are quite neat. They are creative, artistic, but nothing too far from expectations. That isn’t a knock at all, rather the game seems to focus on what matters more, which is the gameplay design. I would rather have great gameplay over mind-blowing graphics. Several games in video game history, which people consider top-tier and epic, don’t look like Horizon Zero Dawn. Pac-Man looks like complete crap, but it’s probably top five, as is Tetris. The latter which relies on blocks and music to keep you entertained. It’s all about the gameplay, but War Theatre still has some visual charm.
The biggest knock I have against War Theatre is the lack of ‘skip’ during gameplay introduction. When you start a story, you are introduced to dialogue and expectations from the characters, which is fine because I like to get into the story — the first time. When you lose and have to start over, you start again with the same dialogue, and no foreseeable way to skip it. I haven’t found a way to skip this part of the game yet. I tried all the buttons and I’m still put through the same dialogue when I lose. Maybe it’s my punishment for going willy-nilly into the game and trying to win immediately, or maybe it’s just a part of the game the devs forgot about. Regardless, I need a skip button. I just want to get right into the gameplay after seeing the story once.
Overall, War Theatre for the Nintendo Switch is a tough hoss of a turn-based game, which harkens back to the day of Dragon Force and Advance Wars, though not quite as perfect as those games. It ups the ante of difficulty, while requiring you to think before you move, or else you’re in for a long day. It’s a challenge, but a welcomed one.
