How Advance Wars: Dual Strike teaches us never to travel alone
Advance Wars: Dual Strike (2005)
Advance Wars: Dual Strike (2005)
It’s a fantasy of most men to be this kind of swashbuckling, international man of leisure, finding ourselves in sunny climates all over the world, sipping martinis and Old Fashioneds, bedding a different dusky maiden every night and generally being a tanned lothario with an incredible amount of chest hair.
I’m sure it’s the same for women as well. Seeing all the girls together, a dozen or more, and embarking on a boozy holiday is a fearsome sight to behold. Individually though, women also want to be sat by the pool, Sex in the Beach in one hand, book in the other, their summer body well and truly achieved and newly bronzed, as the very hunky locals fawn over her.
I’m not sure I’ve got the courage for that kind of solo travel though, if I’m quite honest. It’s the eternal struggle of the self-conscious mind like mine: perfectly happy in my own company, but always fearing that doing things alone would be too weird.
Going to the cinema on one’s own always seems to be the one that splits the room here. I’ve never done it. I’m not sure I know anyone who’s done it. But I would never look down on folks who go and catch yet another Marvel movie on a Wednesday afternoon, sat alongside a load of bewildered pensioners.
Travelling alone though, that’s something I’ve barely done. I’ve spent a couple of weekends away by myself, but nothing further than the next county over, which is pretty much a stone’s throw. It’s not as if I was broadening my horizons or anything. In fact, people wondered if I was depressed. So I stopped that immediately and concluded that solo travel probably isn’t the preserve of a healthy mind.
You can imagine my surprise then, when my missus told me that she had travelled solo all the way to Hong Kong, before we were together. Call me a small-minded, little league yokel, which is essentially what I am, but I don’t think I could muster the bravery for travel like that.
A proper voyage into the unknown. No common language, a completely different culture. And let’s face it, I’m sure Hong Kong is generally safe, but a solo, white, female tourist is always a target. Meanwhile, I’d be shaking with fear on the plane over, I’d hide under a pile of coats for the duration and then I’d probably be dying to go home again.
That’s perhaps one rare instance where me and her differ. But one thing we can agree on, especially now that we’re together, is that travelling solo is one thing - but travelling abroad with each other is pretty damn nice.
Of course, hopefully one has the luxury of travelling with a partner who, you know, doesn’t hate them and doesn’t kick up rough at the first opportunity. Many’s a relationship has been blown to bits on a holiday, when both participants realise they can’t stand each other’s company. Get the right travel buddy though, and you can have a great time anywhere, even if the whole thing gets rained off and you have to spend the week cooped up indoors.
You just can’t beat a good pair. I’ve always said that. And that was the only avenue left open to the developers of Advance Wars: Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS, after the first two Advance Wars games became increasingly broken and unbalanced.
They had added new Commanding Officers to Advance Wars 2, alongside Super CO Powers, new music, a revamped campaign mode, better artstyle and more. It’s hard to push a game of this genre further, so the new gimmick this time is having the ability to control two COs at once, who you’ll swap between at your leisure.
For the unfamiliar, and as a quick debrief, Advance Wars is a turn-based strategy game where you build land, sea and air military units and try to blow your enemy’s ass off the map. Making the difference between factions is the playable COs, who each have their own traits, strengths, weaknesses, designs, and not to mention, their goofy personalities.
Bringing a second CO to the party allows for all kinds of overpowered combinations in battle, as well as opening up the use of the Tag Power, which is a bit like Double Jeopardy, where the scores can really change. Here, you can unleash all sorts of game-bending strategems, and even get a free turn.
I don’t know, imagine a game of chess where you could move twice in a row. Or even three times. And all your pawns become rooks and bishops. And you get to launch missiles at your opponent’s side of the board. That’s the kind of shenanigans we’re talking about here, so needless to say, it pretty much ends the game whenever you can get your hands on a Tag Power in this game.
Pain in the backside? I say no. I love it in fact. I secretly love a game that allows you to break it in two, or lets you get vastly overpowered in some way. And of course the reverse is true: when those powers are invoked against me, I don’t applaud. Instead I respond with severe weeping and gnashing of teeth. It’s not any fun unless I win, right?
But that’s not the only gimmick at play in AW:DS, we’ve got a whole other second screen to play on, thanks to the DS. The two COs can be split across a battle on two fronts, top screen and bottom screen. The top screen can also be a fully aerial battle, high in the sky. You can even send units from the bottom screen to the top.
This really is a game that’s properly jam-packed with content, from the amount of COs available, to the huge amount of War Room maps where you can try for a high score. There’s also Survival mode, with different challenges to overcome. There’s even a sort of real-time combat mode, which sounds like it should be a great change of pace, but in reality it’s just a bit of a confusing mess. Still, it’s there.
You’ve got the Campaign mode of course, the main one-player constituent of the game. There’s a bit of a rubbish plot about the evil Black Hole Army somehow coming from nowhere, again, and coming to power, again. They do this by sort of secretly harvesting energy from the land, turning it into a wasteland while no-one was looking. Heaven knows what the Geneva Convention would make of that.
One of the things I really dig about this game is that there’s a rudimentary level-up system for the COs, which will allow you to customise them with all sorts of Skills that augment their abilities even further. An army with impregnable defences that costs nothing and moonwalks through forests and mountains? It’s yours, if you want it.
Realistically, AW:DS took the series as far as it could go. It was difficult to get any more ridiculous than this game. But when they tried to dial everything back for the next instalment, Advance Wars: Days of Ruin, I don’t think people were on board with that, either.
I say stick with Advance Wars: Dual Strike. This really is a game you can play forever and ever. Better than that, while the game didn’t have an online mode, it did of course carry a Versus mode, only one DS and game needed. And you know by now that the only thing better than a solo campaign is a sortie with a close companion.
26 December 2025