Its pretty alright, better than Dual Strike because the devs weren't doing lines of cocaine between inputting the values for the COs and their abilities, not that this game has spectacular balance mind you. This time around its gritty, and as a result, not so pretty in some ways. For some the character portraits are acceptable, but it wouldn't suprize me if some would call them ugly when you blow them up on an emulator or XL DS model. The visuals on the map unfortunately have that late 2000's desaturation problem that accompanies games about war, so while the texturework is rather good in some parts, the color pallet is bland to the eye, even if it represents the state of the land very well. The campaign, story, and dialogue are very solid all around, with an interesting narrative, and somewhat memorable characters and moments, my only real complaint is some annoying characters, particularly villains and sides, and more importantly, some real annoying maps later on because of the AIs strategy to spam the same units over and over again until you fall asleep bored, or wait through 30 turns to win as you chug out as many anti tanks and infantry as possible to beat the AI's anti tanks and war tanks, or make a ton of AA to deal with the enemies dusters, only for them to swap back to ol reliable; AT and tanks, thus barely make progress. Thankfully for the most part this only happened to me twice. The new CO gimmick is pretty neat too, although I feel a punishment for loosing the unit containing your CO isn't enough, and allows for some spammy strategies in multi. Pretty good game, although Nintendo may not have thought so, as it took them years to bring it to their own homeland, which is real strange, and points to the intended market of gritty military games at the time.