Battalion Wars is a 2005 kind of hybrid third-person shooter and real-time tactics game for the GameCube, developed by Kuju Entertainment. The game was actually originally to be titled as Advance Wars: Under Fire, part of Nintendo’s Wars series.

Pros:

I personally love real-time tactics/strategy games, but I find that almost always work much better on PC and most of the time pretty horrible on a console. When I first started playing this game that is exactly how I felt, however, they do a really good job sending you through “boot-camp” pretty quickly and a minor amount of hand-holding quickly gets you to see some action and enjoy your commanding skills. There is a learning curve to this game, but it’s not too steep and they approach the command problem pretty well, where you actually play a character from third person point of view and kind of “lead from the front” type of set up. The levels are fun, dynamic and challenging. You get cooler and cooler units as you go even commanding aircraft. Naval units are also involved in this game, but are pretty much non-existent. The character design is this game is pretty cool too, in a quirky, cute, cliche type of way.

Cons:

My problem with this game really is that damn command control system. Don’t get me wrong it is so much better then a lot (if not most) console-based real-time tactics games, but it’s still pretty difficult to master. Even when you think you go it, when the chaos of a major battle ensues all your learned command skill will go more or less out the window. Also, a minor note, this game’s visual design, nations, and characters are obviously inspired by the WW2 era and done so really well. Until you get to the Solar Empire (Japan) with seemingly SiFi inspired visual design. I get it for diversity, but it did kind of break the emersion a bit for me.