I haven’t been this thoroughly offended by a game this quickly since The Red Solstice.

This is a hybrid management/tactics game. The management part takes place in real-time, but you can toggle how fast it goes, and the game automatically stops it when something comes up (e.g. UFO spotted, research complete, equipment manufactured, etc.). This is also where alien ships spawn; if it shows up on your radar, you can intercept it; if it doesn’t, you can’t, and if you don’t intercept it, the region it targeted reduces your funding. On the turn-based tactics side, every map is random and has fog of war (with night missions reducing your vision further), and every attack relies on a % chance (never going higher than 95%, so you’re never guaranteed a hit). As for controls, you can left-click a unit to select it, left-click a spot on the map to see how many movement points it’ll cost to move there, left-click that same spot again to confirm the move, left-click an enemy to attack it (attacking also costs movement points), left-click the grenade icon to go into “grenade aim mode” (to see its range and movement point cost), left click again to confirm throwing the grenade to that spot…yeah, that one button really shoulders a lot of the burden. I kinda wish it was spread more evenly between the two mouse buttons, like “left click to preview movement cost, right click to confirm” or something.

One of the first things you’ll notice is that the game doesn’t tell you a bunch of stuff. You can hire more staff during the management part, but there’s no way to see how long it’ll be before they arrive at your base. You can build a new base, but you won’t be allowed to build necessary extensions (living quarters, hangar, etc.) until after it’s done, and then, the game won’t let you build those extensions unless they’re directly adjacent to an already built segment (instead of letting you put it anywhere on the 6x6 grid). It’s even worse for the tactics part: you can mouse over weapons to see their names, but no indication on their range or any other potentially useful information. What are the benefits and drawbacks of flashbangs compared to smoke bombs? No way to know without trial and error (or quitting the game and looking it up online, of course). Uh oh, one of your soldiers is bleeding! How do you use the medkit? Left clicking on it does nothing, but if you right click on it, that also does nothing. You might think you could check the manual to find at least some of this stuff out, but nope; none of that stuff is explained in the manual, either.

However, my biggest issue is that way, way, WAY too much of the game is reliant on percent chances. The most obvious is with attacking: each soldier has a base hit chance that decreases the further away you are from an enemy. It is possible to increase your hit chance temporarily by spending more movement points on the attack, but even your lowest hit chance costs 1/3rd of your total move points, and if you want to have any decent hit chance, you’ll need to spend upwards of 2/3rds to 5/6ths (and that doesn’t count what you’ll need to spend in order to get in range in the first place), and that still only increases your chance; it doesn’t guarantee a hit. Oh, but enemies have more accurate and weapons than you do, and chances are, not only will they land the hit, they’ll kill your soldier in one shot (and whether or not the soldier revives after the battle is based on–you guessed it–a percent chance). Between all of that, the fog of war, and the randomized maps, battles are not strategy-based; they’re luck-based, and the game’s lack of explanation for many of its mechanics just makes it even worse. No matter how much time you spend learning the mechanics and trying to get good, the game can always have an enemy come from off-screen and kill you with a low hit chance, then have you miss when you try to fight back.

This randomness even extends to the management part of the game, too. When a UFO appears on your radar, it always starts as airborne, and the only way to take out airborne ships is with fighter planes, but after you launch your planes, the alien ship could land (become invulnerable to the planes) or it could run away and escape your radar, and then another UFO could appear, but your planes won’t have enough fuel to engage it so you’ll have to return to base and wait for them to refuel. There isn’t even a set timer for when extraterrestrial events occur; there could be nothing for a couple days, or there could be several all at once (with the only guarantee being that they’re out of your radar’s range, meaning you couldn’t do anything about it).

Oh, and that’s all within the first three encounters, by the way. Yes, I gave up. It’s almost impressive how much the game manages to get wrong. Honestly, I’m starting to think Advance Wars was a fluke and I’m actually not a fan of tactics games.