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Battalion Wars 2 By: Josh Adachi Who doesn't love the smell of napalm in the morning? Al Gore doesn't, that's who. Battalion Wars part 1 for the Gamecube was an inspired misfire. You played as a field general who could both: A) order your troops around on field, and B) play as any type of soldier and take out the enemy one-by-one. If you wanted any chance to beat harder portions of the game, you would have to learn to perform both tasks simultaneously. With it's cartoon-style graphics, it felt like a continuation of 1994's General Chaos for the Sega Genesis, another game that has you on double duty as a soldier and a commander. General Chaos is a great, probably underrated game, but the playing field was limited to a single screen. In Battalion Wars, with it's large, diverse play fields, there seemed no limit to the variety of wacky wartime scenarios that you would face. But, if you'll remember the beginning of this paragraph, something went wrong. There were glitches that occurred during the most intense parts of battle. The buttons would go haywire, and I'd find myself jumping in place while my forces were decimated. Still, I loved the idea of BW so much that I decided that if a sequel ever came out, I wouldn't hesitate to buy it. Well, what the heck do you know, somebody out there heard me, because the Battalion Wars II was released in October 2007. The game works great and having those extra Wii motion-triggers helps spread out the controls. I can definitely recommend this game to anybody interested in discovering a new way to play war games.
In Battalion Wars 2 you are a field general who needs to kill a fair share of enemies to give your outnumbered troops a fighting chance, while providing field orders to the your battalion. You have different types of troops to command, all of whom have different strengths and weaknesses. For example, if an enemy tank appears in battle, you will probably want to send your bazooka troops to take it out, but if you leave the bazooka troops out in the open for too long, they'll end up being massacred by the enemies machine gun troops. Conversely, you don't want to send your flame troops to destroy any armored vehicles, but they will handily dismember machine gun troops. Additionally, you can take full control of any specific troop regardless of class type, which means that you can lead your troops from the vantage point of a plane, helicopter, or a warship, if you're so inclined.
The action is frenzied and frustrating. A won battle will often accompany an earnest fist-pump. The harder levels really have you on edge. You will be personally hacking as many enemies as you can while praying that your strategic gamble pays off. Purists of either the RTS or the FPS will note that both genres are watered down in Battalion Wars II, and they are right. If you're a huge fan of one aforementioned genre, and vehemently opposed to the other, this game is probably not for you. BWII does not offer the consistent stream of thought that either genre offers, but the necessity to master two streams of thought simultaneously is actually what makes it great. Your control over any individual character, while offering you a plain advantage over the computer, is not tight enough to allow you to beat a level as a lone (Ikari) warrior. Trying is still fun, though, and I was actually able to get through the end of a level as a lone flame trooper against 3 anti-air vehicles (it took about a half-hour of missiles flying uselessly around me, while I slow-roasted my way through the vehicles' plate armor). Unfortunately, BWII incites one glaring, though unprecedented, complaint that its predecessor does not. In fact, my only criticism of the game may classify me as a sort of racist. Let me explain. Now, I'm not the most patriotic of people, but when I play war games, I like to get a mug of whiskey and be berated around by an insane old white man with a crew cut and a throat-full of tobacco. I want to sing "America, Fuck Yeah!" at the screen, waving my imaginary stars and stripes. This is why my biggest disappointment concerning this game is that you seldom control Frontier (the fictional stand-in for American) forces. Now, the different nations are interwoven in the plot in a clever way and is politically correct in such a way that makes you question classifications like "good guys" and "bad guys." This is great if you're Al Gore; unfortunately, it made my whiskey-soaked heart weep a little. I hate to say it, but the fact that the last level has you as a Tundran (read: Russian) army facing its demons makes me kind of not care.
But this is (probably) a minor complaint. Battalion Wars II is everything a shallow, old-school gamer like myself could want in a contemporary war game: quick action, quick strategy, detached cartoon graphics and excuse to drink whiskey (seriously this game goes so well with whiskey, that I could actually feel the J&B on the back of my throat every time I played dry). The replay value is decent, and the reward system gives adequate incentive to master each battle. The game play is deep enough that mastering a level really is a different play-experience than just trying to reach the end. Final Verdict: Four Anti-Aircraft Shells out of Five.
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