Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp — the portable tactics classic restored

Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp had an unusually public production history before it ever reached players. Announced for a December 2021 launch, Nintendo pulled the release date without an immediate replacement, and the reason was widely understood to be the discomfort of shipping a game built around toy-soldier warfare imagery in the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine. It finally arrived in April 2023, developed by WayForward, remaking two Game Boy Advance titles — 2001’s Advance Wars and 2003’s Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising — as a single package with a new diorama art style replacing the original sprite work. That’s a long, awkward road to a release, and the thing worth saying up front is that the wargame underneath the new coat of paint didn’t need saving. It was already close to right two decades ago.

It’s worth naming the specific counter relationships to see how tightly the web is wound: infantry capture properties but lose badly to any vehicle; anti-tank units and artillery both punish tanks disproportionately for their cost, but anti-tank units are themselves vulnerable to infantry and indirect fire; artillery and rocket units hit devastatingly hard at range but cannot fire on adjacent tiles and become nearly helpless if an enemy closes distance; and air units dominate ground forces that lack dedicated anti-air but lose cleanly to purpose-built anti-air vehicles and fighters. No single unit type is strong against everything, and building an army that’s efficient against one likely opposing composition while remaining vulnerable to another is the actual skill test the counter web creates, independent of whichever CO bonus a player has chosen for that mission.

Rock-paper-scissors that still rewards reading the map

Advance Wars runs on a deliberately legible rock-paper-scissors unit web: infantry are cheap and can capture properties but fold against vehicles, tanks dominate open ground but are vulnerable to anti-tank and artillery, artillery hits hard at range but can’t fire adjacent, and air and naval units introduce their own counters against everything else. None of that is unusual on its own — plenty of tactics games run a similar counter web — but Advance Wars pairs it with a fog-of-war option and a terrain system where forests, mountains, and roads each modify a unit’s defence and movement cost in ways that reward reading the map before committing an attack rather than just reading the unit-type matchup. A tank sitting in a forest tile is a meaningfully different tactical problem from the same tank in the open, and Re-Boot Camp’s remade UI does a better job than the GBA originals ever could of surfacing that terrain information at a glance.

The system’s signature twist, and the one that still separates Advance Wars from its imitators, is the Commanding Officer layer: each CO carries a distinct passive bonus — one might buff indirect-fire units, another cheapens infantry production, another boosts air power at the cost of naval strength — plus a chargeable special power that activates once enough units have fought under that CO’s command. A CO Power can heal and resupply an entire army in one turn, grant a temporary but decisive combat bonus across the whole map, or in the more dramatic Super CO Powers, turn a losing battle around in a single stroke. That layer turns each mission’s army composition into a personality choice as much as a tactical one, and it’s the piece of Advance Wars’s design that the tactics genre still hasn’t fully replicated elsewhere.

What the remake changed and what it wisely didn’t

WayForward’s diorama presentation — units and terrain rendered as toy-like 3D models on a tabletop-scale battlefield — is a genuine visual upgrade over the GBA’s flat sprites without changing the readability the original relied on; unit silhouettes and terrain colour-coding remain clear enough to read at a glance, which matters more in a turn-based tactics game than in almost any other genre, since a misread terrain tile is the difference between a safe attack and a wasted unit. The remake bundles both campaigns — Advance Wars and Black Hole Rising — plus a “Designer Notes” mode offering developer commentary on specific missions, a War Room mode for tackling curated challenge maps outside the story campaigns, and online multiplayer alongside local link-up play. It’s a genuinely complete package for two games that most players in 2023 would only otherwise access on original GBA hardware or through emulation.

What it didn’t do is meaningfully expand the design itself. There’s no new campaign content beyond the two remade games and the War Room challenge maps, and additional map packs were positioned as a later addition gated behind a Nintendo Switch Online expansion tier rather than included outright, which reads as a odd decision for a genre revival this overdue — the appetite for new Advance Wars content clearly exists, and Re-Boot Camp’s core release doesn’t fully feed it. That’s a marketing and platform decision more than a design failure, but it’s worth knowing before buying: this is a faithful, well-executed remaster of two very good wargames, not a new Advance Wars entry in disguise.

What the two campaigns teach differently

Bundling both games together rather than remaking just the original also lets Re-Boot Camp show its design evolution in a way a standalone remake couldn’t. The first Advance Wars campaign is deliberately foundational — its early missions are close to tutorials in disguise, teaching the counter web and terrain rules one at a time before letting later missions combine them, and its four playable COs (Andy, Max, Sami, and Nell among the roster) are each built around a fairly legible single-idea bonus. Black Hole Rising, the second game, assumes that grounding is already in place and moves faster, introducing a larger CO roster with more situational and interactive bonuses — some COs gain strength specifically when fighting near their own capturable properties, others trade a weakness in one unit type for a sharp advantage in another — and leans harder on multi-front missions where managing several engagements across a large map at once, rather than a single contained battle, is the actual test. Playing both back to back in one package makes that escalation legible in a way that playing either game in isolation, years apart, wouldn’t.

The remake’s War Room mode draws challenge maps from across both campaigns’ unit rosters and CO combinations, and functions as the game’s answer to a lack of new story content: rather than write missions for a plot the two remade campaigns had already resolved, WayForward built a mode that tests mastery of systems the story missions had already introduced, under harder constraints — a fixed, often lean set of starting units against a stronger opposing force, rewarding efficient unit trades and precise terrain use rather than simply outproducing the enemy. It’s a reasonable way to extend a remaster’s replay value without inventing new lore, even if it doesn’t fully answer the appetite for a genuinely new mainline entry.

The lineage worth knowing

Advance Wars itself descends from Nintendo’s Famicom Wars, a Japan-only 1988 release for the Famicom that established the same grid-based, CO-driven wargame template years before Advance Wars brought it to a Western audience on the Game Boy Advance. That ancestry matters for understanding why the genre feels so fully formed even in its earliest Western entry — Advance Wars wasn’t inventing the wargame-with-personality format in 2001, it was importing a design that had already been refined across multiple Japanese-market predecessors. The verdict on Re-Boot Camp itself is straightforward: it’s the best way to play two genuinely excellent turn-based wargames today, hampered only by a production history and a content strategy that undersold how much appetite there clearly was for more.

Local multiplayer as the format’s other core appeal

It’s worth stating plainly that Advance Wars has always been as much a local multiplayer game as a single-player campaign, and Re-Boot Camp’s support for local wireless link-style play alongside online matchmaking honours that history rather than treating multiplayer as an afterthought. A hotseat or local match between two players who both understand the terrain and counter-unit rules turns into a genuinely different experience from the campaign’s AI opponents, since a human opponent will bait a unit into a bad terrain match-up deliberately rather than simply walking into one, and the CO Power timing becomes a bluffing game of its own — holding a charged Super CO Power back a turn longer than the opponent expects, rather than using it the instant it’s available, is exactly the kind of higher-level play the campaign’s scripted AI never forces a player to learn. That local-multiplayer depth is arguably the strongest argument for the handheld-first design Advance Wars has always carried, remaining fully intact in Re-Boot Camp’s Switch incarnation even though it’s no longer competing against other games on the same dedicated handheld hardware.

Spoilers below

Black Hole Rising’s campaign escalates the original game’s fairly straightforward good-versus-evil conflict into something more morally textured: the Black Hole Army’s commander Sturm is revealed partway through as an entity whose ambitions extend beyond simple territorial conquest into deliberately engineering global environmental catastrophe to weaken all other nations simultaneously, and several of the CO characters players fought as allies in the first game’s campaign — including Colin and, contingent on specific mission choices, Flak — have arcs in the sequel built around defection or redemption that recontextualise their loyalties from the base game. The final confrontation against Sturm plays out as a deliberately unfair, high-difficulty spike by design, forcing the player to have banked and correctly deployed Super CO Powers from multiple commanders rather than relying on any single CO’s strength, which is the mission where the game’s CO-personality system stops being a flavour layer and becomes the entire solution to the fight.

If the visible-math tactics appeal is what hooked you here, Into the Breach pushes the same “read the board, not the dice” philosophy to its logical extreme with fully deterministic combat and no RNG at all. And for a tactics game that adds an RPG relationship layer on top of a similar grid-based counter system, Fire Emblem: Three Houses is the clearest point of comparison for how differently two studios have built on the same genre foundation.