"Ok, it's 7 P.M., I'm gonna take a break and play only one quick battle in Wargroove".
"Perfect, I smashed that general plant to smithereens, now let's go back to w-WHAT? IT'S 8:30 P.M. ALREADY?"

I think that summarizes almost everything you need to know about it. It's a turn-based war game with classes, and like Pokémon, every class has their strenghts and weakness, so you will have to balance them in the field and control all the villages you can. Simple and addictive. Various modes. Map editor. CONTENT.

This game set out to be a spiritual successor to the 'wars' series (most notably advanced wars). I think it did an incredible job doing that. The combat feels just as good, and the change to having your CO powers be fighters on the map makes every choice feel even more impactful, as you do not want to lose them.

I personally get a bit backed off from these types of games as the battlefields get more complex with more enemies all at once. However, I think the pace is great, and if you like the tactical turn based combat style of game, you'll enjoy it beginning to end.

A game with a solid foundation that has a lot of weird and frustrating things to it where by the end of the game I was kinda relived I finished it.

Getting the positives out of the way first, the obvious one being the game looks phenomenal, absolutely gorgeous pixel art. The other part being that they made navel combat feel much more worth buying units for, something I felt like Advance Wars didn't really figure out until Days of Ruin.

It's wild seeing how they managed to have navel combat on par, maybe even better than Days of Ruin, but the way how they tackled your commanders I find much worse than Days of Ruin. The fact that you instantly lose the game if your commander dies is so frustrating because these levels are insanely long. You can be out here playing the game and forgot to check the range of the enemy's dragon and then your commander gets blasted and now you either restart the entire level or go back to one of your saves. Your CO dying causing you to lose is far too punishing for an upside that's just a strong single unit that can occasionally use a good ability.

Going into the levels of this game. There is like no variety to these missions. It's either a standard skirmish where you have to destroy all the barracks and/or defeat the commander, or it's a level with infinite spawning enemies, the latter being just not fun and a slog to play through as some for some of them, you have to get your units to a specific area, so the best thing to do is to just run away from fights. There's also no fun mission objectives, and when they do try to spice up the standard skirmish levels, like with fog of war, they only did for 3 missions, one of those missions being optional. You also have some maps just being way too big, taking your troops forever to get to the battle. There's also the fact that the ai isn't all that smart. It will make baffling decisions like leaving it's commander unguarded and out in the open when you have an abundance of units to attack it with, or even just send it's CO into your group of units just because it had it's groove ready.

The story is also real whatever. Good guy must stop evil person from dooming the world. Advance Wars does the same thing, but at least the characters were entertaining while the characters in Wargroove felt cliche at best and annoying at worst.

I feel like a real snob constantly comparing this to Advance Wars, but this game wears it's inspiration on it's sleeve so the comparison is inevitable.