Battalion Wars

I liked this game a little better than the Advance Wars series, but that's not saying much. The more action oriented gameplay worked better, graphics were better than most on the GameCube and the sound was fitting, but sloppy. The AI for your party was dumb and it took a bit for me to realize this. The first handful of stages were easy and didn't require much splitting up of your guys. When I started reaching higher levels I noticed my guys didn't do anything for themselves. They were sitting ducks unless I spoon fed any little command to them. I understand this is probably the way it's meant to be but it felt like I was in charge of a bunch of morons . At the very least it would have been nice for them to take cover or start attacking another enemy in the vicinity once one was defeated. Once I overcame this issue the game started to roll pretty smoothly. There is also a nice level of difficulty to be found in this game. I literally beat the last level with only one guy left, who only had one notch of life left, with an enemy bullet about to hit. I barely got the last flag raised in time. The ending was pretty sorry though. The game allows you to go back and perfect your score in any previously passed levels, but I felt no desire or need to. I haven't played the Wii version yet and it does have some online features so I might have to check that out, but when it comes to war games, Nintendo misses the mark. You're better off with the third party offerings.