It's a definitive thematic improvement over Codemaster's reinterpretation (gone are the flashy effects and programming showoff) by means of a more serious interior and the recruitment screen that shows all the people you've lost to a war you don't even know the details of (which makes the loss of people feel more like something out of control than some noble deed).

And you WILL lose a lot of troops, the level design encourages you to split troops, which wasn't possible in the GBC version, and sacrifice them into enemy fire a lot of the time and sometimes the battlefied is so unmerciful your squad gets dropped next to unavoidable projectiles.

However it still feels kind of tedious and overlong like the GBC version, at 72 levels that get kind of repetitive until the last third start having more novel ideas to keep things fresh. I'm pretty sure boring the player wasn't to portray its anti war message (since its provocative tagline is "War has never been so much fun") but instead make you realize how many people die in the battlefield while someone above them carries out plans away from danger, so I would have prefered a much shorter game to carry its point across.

Painfully ironic that a game known for its anti war message in home computers (version which I haven't played but have seen some parts of) was ported to a Nintendo console, so with kids for a main target, and with a company known in the 90s for trying to be the least controversial possible... being misinterpreted by Codemasters in every way possible.

It plays straight the seriousness of the missions you are sending the troops to, and they don't even bother putting the part in the opening song with the satire in the lyrics "go up to your brother, kill them with your gun, leave him dying in his uniform, drying in the sun", which leaves the rest of the game feeling like a tasteless banalization and glorification of war with funny screams as people die instead of a satire where you sadly keep sending individually named soldiers to die and make you realize what you are doing. The infamous "recruitment" screen which starts piling up graves as your soldiers die in the field, leaving a strong visual impression, is replaced by having a technically impressive menu system (which still lists the soldiers whio died in a separate screen), which next to the digitized speech samples and the FMV intro running in the Game Boy tells me the porters were more interested in making it look cool than actually conveying an emotion as simple as it was in the original PC game.