While appearing to be a strategy game on the surface, Advance Wars frequently devolves into trial and error. In maps with fog of war, enemy unit locations are expected to be memorized through repeated playthoughs of the same map. Repetitive and unrewarding, Advance Wars pads out a small modicum of content with clunky and slow missions, bafflingly full of lifeless storytelling and cringeworthy writing. A poor effort all around.
Cool presentation can’t save this game from inexplicably bad AI (drivers arbitrarily taking a longer than necessary route or refusing to use a particular highway for no reason) and visual and gameplay glitches, such as deleted highways not always being refunded. Otherwise cool, but it’s hard to have fun when the mechanics are so fundamentally broken. Another example are the traffic lights, which rarely seem to actually help traffic flow, generally it seems better to just let the traffic figure itself out instead. The lights can’t be timed by the player either.
I don't think it spoils anything (especially if you are a Kojima fan) to say that the game ends with nearly 3 hours of cutscenes. Which would be somewhat excusable if they were even mildly interesting. While rendered beautifully, it speaks to just how awful the story telling is that such graphics can't even save the cutscenes. Characters talk in circles about meaningless nonsense that is given so much screen time it's disgusting. The complete lack of self- awareness on Kojima's part would be amusing if the cutscenes weren't so tedious, having to listen again and again to characters plodding over the same nonsensical plot points.
