Gamespot score: 9.2 (editor's choice)
my score: 9.0
(+)Pros:- Gameplay is highly addictive,- campaign's story sucks you in like hell,- campaign has good difficulty curve, -tutorial is detailed and very easy to learn for newcomers,- plenty of COs to use and try out (including new ones),- multiplayer is extremely addicting with friends (wheter or not they have a DS system),- new unit additions such as stealth and megatanks add more depth to strategies,- CO tag system rocks.
(-)Cons:- lots of recycled shit such as maps from previous games.
Gameplay time :100 hours +( very long lasting)
1st game of today! Advance wars: dual strike is an old, but awesome game. If you ask me its a huge huge improvement from the 2nd game from GBA and this was probably one of my 1st DS games. 1 word to describe it, greatness. It improves on almost every game aspect since the second game, and is one of the most addicting games ever made on the DS, period. Oh well lets get this started.
Advance wars: dual strike's story takes place in omega land, I think. The story no longer follows andy as the main protoganist, it follows a new lead, jake, and his friend rachel. It still follows about the story of chasing and beating down the black hole army, it talks about the orange star army, lead by rachel and jake, going to different continents to beat the black hole army. Along the way they meet allied nation COs, some new ones too, including sasha (colin's sister), javier and grim. It all follows up to the point where more and more COs fight and they work together to stop von bolt, the new black hole big boss.
Dual strike still poses the same gameplay as before, where your active CO plays a huge part in your playstyle. Each CO has his/her own passive abilities and CO power. CO power has 2 levels, normal and super, and obviously one would wait for his/her super and then use it (unless you are playing adder/coal). But in dual strike, you can tag COs. Thats right, you can now use 2 COs in a team, and tag as you see fit. You can now build your dream pair, but of course, due to story reasons, some characters work bettter with others, and dont work as well with others. And the brand new awesome dual strike feature, allows you to use both COs super s, in one turn. Thats right, you can play 2 COs in one turn. How cool is that? You can use that turn to do some major hurt.
Gameplay remains laregly similar, as I said before. You build tanks, soldiers and shit to demolish your enemies. 2 ways to win, totally destroy all your enemy units, or capture thier HQ. This is usually dependant on skills of players in multiplayer. A good multiplayer match between humans can go on for hours and hours if the players are good, and they are using thier ace CO teams. This can also be the same even with the AI, believe it or not they are actually a bunch of smart faggots. My best team was sasha and colin, and against my friend who used eagle and sammy plus another 2 AI, the match lasted a good 8 hours or more. Its that crazy. Also, in campaign, you are usually outnumbered like hell at the start, and some conditions make some missions most impossible, but players can always act smart and somehow get themselves out of the sticky spot and turn things around.
Dual strike is a great game, been playing it since I got my DS, and now I still play it when my cousin or friends come to visit. Though the only thing bad about it is, that many maps are recycled. Yes I mean those when you play multiplayer, even some of those maps sold by hachi are used before at least once in previous games. I mean since we can have new maps the old ones wont be neccacery.
Happy gaming!
