Advance Wars: Dark Conflict

These additions - along with some new planes, different terrain types that mask or inhibit movement, and sensible refinements like a War Tank to replace the similar Neo and Mega Tanks - couple well to mainstays like basic tanks, artillery, APCs (now known as Rigs) and aerial units like the bomber. A typical encounter is no longer quite so tank-friendly, and many of the factory-deprived maps are set up nicely for balanced encounters that call upon your restraint as well as your knowledge of which unit is best at what and over what distance. CO powers are reduced in scope, as we mentioned, but the COs themselves can eventually take to the battlefield, influencing troops around them in a manner that adds another layer of strategy to the higher end of the game, without forcing new players to struggle with years of complicated legacy features. Another new element helping to make up for the reductions there is a single-level experience system that ranks up individual units based on the amount of kills they accumulate, which gives you slightly more pause before sending them off to cheap deaths to facilitate an easier next move.

The Campaign mode also integrates a number of "Trial" maps, which are like the War Room maps of old, and pop up away from the general flow of the story missions. These provide a sterner test of your abilities, meaning that existing fans can get into the trickier stuff earlier on, while first-timers can return to them later once their skills have developed - aided by some well-illustrated in-game tutorial screens, too. There is also a Free Battle mode, where you can play on the game's maps right from the start, and a Design Room for creating your own battlefields, even setting up the enemy AI.

Then of course there is the wireless multiplayer. Locally it supports up to four players, and over the Internet you can go one on one with your friends. There's even voice communication using the microphone, which actually works quite well. Not many of our friends were online when we played through the game (it only launched in the US, where it's known as Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, on Monday, and isn't out here until Friday, 25th January), but the games we did manage to engage in didn't appear to suffer from any debilitating lag.

However, for all the positive changes and additions, the decision to redesign the game in greys, browns and other grumpy colours and put the story in the hands of a jarringly earnest and slightly depressive goth blogger is bound to cause consternation in some quarters. It's not just the tone of the writing: the graphics are a bit Command & Conquer: Red Alert (with a fairly useless 'zoom' element that reduces your range of vision too much for my liking); the bits where the COs chat are illustrated with forgettable, Fire Emblem-style character drawings that brighten up when someone speaks; the soundtrack (main menu music aside, perhaps) is pretty generic; and the menus, for that matter (thanks, brackets), appear to have been an afterthought.

That makes a big difference, too - the important statistics and visual explanations of which unit-types your current charge is effective or ineffective against are harder to read at a glance, and this can be fatal. It's genuinely bizarre to find ourselves berating Intelligent Systems for a lack of attention to detail, but there we go. You may also run out of game to play quicker than you did before, thanks to a relative lack of unlockables, and the loss of the shop where you could buy new toys.