Wargroove

I've had my eye on Wargroove since last year. Billed as a sort of spiritual successor to the Advance Wars series, I was pumped. In fact, I was even more excited about this one than Fire Emblem: Three Houses. And I'm a FE fan! But something about Wargroove just looked awesome. Maybe it's the throwback art style? Maybe it's the campaign editor? Maybe it's the fact that Wargroove is considerably cheaper than Three Houses? Haha. I don't know.

But I was also determined to wait on a physical release of Wargroove. I KNEW it would happen. I mean take a look at what Limited Run Games, Super Rare Games, and like a dozen other boutique publishers have released this year on Switch. It HAD to happen. And I was right. It's here.

And was it worth the wait? Oh dear goodness... YES.

I've only played a couple of hours so far, but man, it's so good. It has that solid Advance Wars throwback vibe. But the setting is a lot closer to Fire Emblem. So it's almost a mash-up (minus that RPG leveling of FE). The visuals and music are great. I'll be honest, I don't care much about story in a strategy game like this, but the gameplay? Wowza.

It's got everything. There's the usual classes who have different strengths and weaknesses. There's capturing areas on the map to raise resources. There's the risk/reward of putting your commander on the line. There's deciding which new units to call in each round. There's... a lot to think about. And I love it.

The controls and menus are super intuitive. Everything you need to know is a click away, and what you need to know depends on how deep you want to get. There's also lots of customization in presentation and gameplay. Everything has been so well thought out here.

Before I even started the campaign, I also spend a while browsing the user generated content. It's so awesome to see these fan projects remaking OTHER games within this engine. The Advance Wars and Fire Emblem series are obvious, but still exciting as it means there's going to still be lots of reasons for me to continue playing this outside of the main campaign.

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Wargroove is no joke. It looks so sweet and cute, but damn it's actually a super deep game. Which I appreciate as a big fan of the genre. But truth be told, I might need to take a break right now. It's just a much heavier game than I feel like I have time for right now. What I need right now is more pick-up-and-play stuff. I think.

I'm now in chapter 4 (of 7) in the main campaign and the difficulty has spiked immensely. I'm not even embarrassed to say I've bumped the difficulty down a notch because it was eating up so much time. I had a couple of battles that took me twenty-something turns to then beef it and find myself starting over again. If this was last year I'd be in heaven. But right now with a baby in the house and such limited gaming time, these kinds of setbacks bum me out.

Again - this is a brilliant game. It's just not something I have the time nor concentration for at the moment. So I'll probably approach the second half of the game in smaller chunks instead of really focusing on this as my go-to game for the moment.