Review: Warside (PC)

There is a very fine line between homage and something that is just outright theft of an idea. A good example of the former is Wargroove, which is clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’ Advance Wars, but has its own identity through storytelling, unit design, features, presentation and so on. On the other end is Warside.

Warside plays well, and it’s quite substantial too. There are 30 stages to work through in the single-player, multiplayer, 14 different commanders to master, each with their own special abilities and capabilities. Sound familiar? Yes, it’s an exact clone of how Advance Wars does things, and there are parallels in the skills and leader types too.

One area where Warside does diverge from Advance Wars is in the design of those leaders. Where Advance Wars has that anime aesthetic, Warside opts for a more western comic aesthetic with the character portraits. Unfortunately, this is an area where they probably should have also copied Advance Wars, because the dialogue and banter between the characters is as silly and frivolous as in Intelligent Systems’ tactical masterpiece, but comes across as cringeworthy when “spoken” by a Bane-like homage. The anime quality of Advance Wars made the thin narrative charmingly twee, but here it just comes across as amateur.

In other areas, where Warside does step away from Advance Wars, it does so in a very intriguing manner. Perhaps the single biggest change is the way that city capture works. In Advance Wars, You capture a city by moving an infantry unit over the top of it and then triggering the capture command. This results in the character reducing the “health” of a city by as much health as the character itself has (so a character with six health points will shave six points off the city). When the city’s health reaches zero, it’s captured, returned to full health, and now the enemy needs to do the same to capture it for their side.

In Warside, meanwhile, a neutral city is immediately converted when attacked. But it only has two health, which it will steadily increase with each turn. This makes newly captured cities incredibly vulnerable, and also pushes the opposing side to take biggest risks to target those cities while they are in such a state. It’s subtle, but this approach does cause the intensity of battle to increase, as both sides commit to move rapidly on cities and then scramble in their defence. I liked this quality about Warside a lot.

There are also some unique units, with the standout being a bulldozer unit. They don’t do much damage directly, but they’re able to push units in the direction they attack from. This allows you to take tactical control of an area… or just push enemy vehicles into bodies of water, which eliminates them instantly.

Otherwise, the developers worked very hard to elicit nostalgia for Intelligent Systems’ work, and they do largely succeed. In the early stages of play, I tried to get every unit to attack every other unit, from every type of environment just to see the iconic little “cut scenes” play out where the units line up and shoot at one another. The art team has been fastidious in recreating the detailed pixel sprites and their little idle animations. In fact, you could argue that this game does do a better job of capturing nostalgia than WayForward’s recent remake of Advance Wars 1 & 2. They really did screw up the art direction in that game.

We also shouldn’t overlook the fact that unlike Advance Wars, Warside is available on everything. At first, it’s just on PC, but the game will be coming to consoles at a later date, and will be cross-play compatible for online multiplayer. Consequently, it has a much larger potential audience and it’s going to be far easier to find other people to play with.

I would expect that the multiplayer gains a dedicated following, firstly because the game is well-balanced and interesting, with different leaders having unique units to provide tactical depth. There’s a mission editor for both single and multiplayer. It lacks the ability to create little campaigns like Wargroove did, but the toolset is enough that a staggering range of maps can be created.

Warside’s single biggest flaw is that it fails to do anything to step out of the shadow of Advance Wars in any meaningful way. Without its own personality it is, ultimately, not as memorable as it should be, but that cross-play multiplayer and the fact that you don’t need your gaming group to all own Switches to enjoy playing together does save it. For not just locked to PC, but by the time it comes to consoles, I expect it will have a pretty dedicated following.