Nintendo is pretty smart. The Advance Wars series is one of the best strategy war games to hit the Game Boy Advance. A good number of gamers were excited when Nintendo announced that the series would make the jump to the GameCube. However, a couple months before the game was set to hit the Cube, Nintendo mysteriously changed the name of the game to Battalion Wars, dropping it's link with the Advance Wars series. After playing the game, it's become quite clear why Nintendo opted to remove any connection to the Advance Wars series.

Battalion Wars tries to take a war strategy game and turn it into a watered down war game that feels closer to the old school Contra titles than an Advance Wars game. While an old school Contra feel wouldn't be so bad, this game was not designed for mindless run and gun gameplay. It was designed for strategically placing troops and executing missions based on knowledge of the enemy and the battlefield. Unfortunately, many aspects of the gameplay make that impossible.

First and foremost, the further your progress into Battalion Wars, the more intricate the missions will be. You'll start having to face off against new enemy troops, and missions will have multiple objectives. While all of this is being thrown at you, you're commanding officers will be there to provide new troops for you to use, and strategies for the battlefield. So far, so good; that is until you try to put those strategies to use. The more strategy you try to infuse into your gameplay, the worse off you'll be.

Each of your troop types specializes in taking down specific enemy units. The bazooka carries are designed to take down enemy tanks, while the missile troops are best at taking on airborne attackers. So it would make sense to have the ability to divide your troops and send them off to battle specific enemy units. However, this is easier said than done in Battalion Wars. Using the d-pad in combination with the X or Y button, you can have specific units or troops guard or attack. But if you want them to attack you have to lock on to a specific target, and press the Y button.

Doing all of this in the midst of command is far more difficult than it should be. In addition, since you have to personally target the enemy units you want specific troops to attack, you have to be close enough to target them, which means all of your troops have to be that close if you want a timely response. Things became so troublesome that it was actually easier to take one trooper through entire missions. If that trooper died, we'd grab another one and pick up where we left off. While this didn't work with every mission, it was far more successful than trying to plan out any sort of strategy with how limited the controls are.

The graphics overall are average at best, but the animation on the troops is top notch. The voice acting is above average in quality, but the voices themselves can get extremely annoying at times. Some of the lines are a bit quirky, but they match the theme of the game. Kuju Entertainment was even nice enough to support 16:9 gaming for those of you with widescreen televisions.

To its credit, Battalion Wars can be fun if you just want to run and gun through the game. But once you hit the later missions, the difficulty level significantly increases, and you'll be forced to use the frustrating troop controls. You'll be better off if you don't take the game too seriously, and just have fun with it. You may get hammered in the later missions, but trying to apply too much strategy to Battalion Wars will result in frustration instead of successful missions. This game could've been a lot better, but maybe the first true Advance Wars console title will fill the void Battalion Wars has left.