"What Battalion Wars does, it does well."

Battalion Wars follows a story fairly similar to WWII. You have the Western Frontier, Tundran Territories, and Xylvania. The Western Frontier and Tundrans are at constant uneasy "peace," then the Xylvanian attacks them. However, the story really isn't important. It's the gameplay that matters.

Graphics: The graphics have nothing truly spectacular, and are a bit cartoonish as one would expect. However, that said, the game looks very good, from the largest plane down to the smallest infantry. The graphics do everything they need to: You can tell what is happening, and differentiate between all your units. 8.5/10

Gameplay: The single player campaign is done very well, but there is unfortunately no multiplayer at all. However, the campaign mode is done very well. The game is easy enough to finish, although you'll need to do a lot better than finish for a good score. Enough good scores will get a bonus chapter.

During the missions themselves, you play a captain in control of a small battalion that varies from mission to mission. Your mission changes each time. Sometimes, you'll have to destroy certain target(s), sometimes you'll have to keep a certain unit alive, and sometimes you'll have to capture/defend a fort. Either way, the game changes pace very well, and no mission is too frustrating.

Your forces are not always specifically suited to the job, so you may have to use your own skills to finish a job. You can bring only certain units along with you, take control of a unit type your particularly like, assign units to defensive positions, set some units to defend an area and others to attack, and not have to worry about them getting killed because the AI is bad. The AI runs things very well, so if your plan is good, it should execute well. The game isn't frustrating in any aspect at all.

However, the game is sadly rather short, and has no multiplayer mode. This makes it hard to give a very good gameplay score, as well as a bad one, because it executes so well, but the planning ws so poor. 6.5/10

Sound: Everything that should be there is there: Soldiers yell frantically during combat, shells blast out of their barrels, Commanding officers speak, and so on. Everything you'd expect to hear in WWII is there. 9/10

Controls: The controls are done very well. You can easily assign one man to a bunker, a group to assault a tank, and shoot down invaders quickly, without any frustration at all, which is rather unexpected for a console game of this nature. 10/10

Overall, BW is worth a rent, but it won't last much longer. If there were a multiplayer mode, this game would have been phenomenal. But, as things stand, we'll just have to hope for Battalion Wars II.

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 10/19/05