But allow me to explain myself here. With regard to most RTS games, the challenge is always in trying to handle the orchestration of an entire army all on your own—and that’s fine, because you’re provided with a supportive set of tools with which you can easily issue commands and logistically facilitate your troops. In other words, when your base is attacked, you’re notified in several different ways—radar flashes, verbal warnings, and visual cues—and thus you’re able to quickly take action from your cozy seat above the battlefield, clicking and dragging to command your troops precisely and intuitively. In fact, that’s arguably the most enticing aspect of the experience—that ability to easily perceive and respond to specific situations in a manner that resembles a complicated game of real-time chess.
But in Battalion Wars, the situation is different. You’re not sitting above the battlefield and watching the action from a bird’s-eye perspective. Instead, you’re on the battlefield, controlling a single unit of your choice in full 3-D, wholly responsible for that unit’s performance in battle. Meanwhile, you’re still in charge of keeping track of what’s going on with the rest of your squad, and sometimes it isn’t easy to see where and why things are taking place. It’s also not so easy to manage your troops; there are no boxes to be drawn or points to be clicked… instead, you must simply command your troops to either follow you or stay still, depending on the situation. By singling out a certain category of units, you can divide them as necessary to, say, protect your infantry from enemy flame troopers, but it’s still much more challenging than simply selecting blocks of units and instantaneously guiding them to chosen locations on the battlefield. In a word, it’s overwhelming.
Matters are made worse by the game’s unforgiving “wait/follow” system (as described earlier). Although things generally work out, there are some scenarios (increasingly more of them as the game progresses) where only a perfect understanding of which units are following and which units are staying put will do—and Battalion Wars doesn’t do enough to communicate these things in rough situations. For example, in one early mission, you’re asked to destroy four generators powering an electromagnetic barrier around the enemy. Following a brief cut scene detailing your objective, control is automatically switched to a set of gunships high above the battlefield flying directly toward the generators. However, those gunships are not the only things moving toward the generators—so are the rest of your ground troops if you previously had them set to follow. In situations like this, it would have been nice to have some sort of audible warning, or at least a color-coded indicator of the troops’ current status.
Wi-Fi Warfare
Complaints about the gameplay aside, there are some attractive multiplayer options in BWii (all Wi-Fi-based—there is no split-screen). Three main multiplayer modes are included. In the simplest of the three, Skirmish, you simply square off against another player’s army in the arena of your choice. Assault puts one player on offense and another on defense—generally working to protect some sort of home base or important structure. And finally, co-op pits you and a friend (or random acquaintance) against a computer-controlled army in one of twelve different scenarios. Skirmish is a bit messy—plagued by the same foundational issues that make the more complex single-player missions difficult (usually the “strategic” battles devolve into little more than chaos)—but the other two modes are a bit more captivating. That’s primarily because you’re dealing with another human opponent in both of them, so both players are struggling with the same squad management challenges.
Although communication is very limited in these multiplayer games (as is traditional with Nintendo-published Wi-Fi games), it is possible for one player to press a button “request” assistance from the other one, after which the other player can choose to “accept” the request by pressing a button in response. This provides for at least some degree of coordination, a necessary ingredient for cooperative play. In the end, Wi-Fi multiplayer serves as a good break from the sometimes tiring single-player campaign.
War – It’s FAN-tastic
Well, not quite fantastic perhaps, but in spite of its shortcomings, Battalion Wars 2’s ambition counts for a lot. It’s the first action/real-time strategy game for the Wii, and it’s also one of the only ones to date to provide genuine online play. The presentation isn’t perfect, but aesthetically the game is attractive, and the soundtrack (while mostly forgettable) is certainly suitable to the atmosphere. The single-player campaign is of adequate length—with fewer missions than the GameCube predecessor, but featuring considerably larger arenas and more complex missions. If you’re the type of person who is adept at juggling lots of different tasks simultaneously under pressure, you might just find your niche in Battalion Wars 2 in spite of its occasionally distressing gameplay. And if you’re hungry for a functional online experience, you owe BWii at least a rental.
- 1 2