Battalion Wars, formerly known as Advance Wars: Under Fire, looks quite a bit better visually with very lush game environments, but there's not much new known about gameplay details. It's retaining the same slightly cartoony style, but shares none of the same characters from previous Advance Wars games. So far, there's no word on if multiplayer exists, but the single-player is said to be a fairly long 20 missions.

As before, it features standard 3rd-person shooter controls and gameplay slightly similar to Pikmin. One difference is that The AI of friendly units is pretty sharp, as it automatically pathfinds, fires on enemies, and even picks up health items. One slight difference is that infantry units don't commandeer vehicles; vehicles are strictly independent units. So far, we've seen tanks (with a turret and machine gun fire), jeeps (fast single-machine gun units), and various air units that haven't been playable yet.

Battalion Wars comes out on 9/19.

Last updated: 05/11/2004

Advance Wars is being developed for the GameCube by Kuju Entertainment Ltd. Instead of the usual turn-based combat of the series, the battles happen in real-time.

The player actually takes the field and attacks enemy units as well as guiding the other units. Units seen so far include tanks, transport choppers, zepplins, fighter planes and a few different kinds of troops (machine gun, flamethrower, rocket launcher).

Troops gain experience and ranks, and their skills improve. Exactly how is still unknown. It appears that troops can be rallied and guided in a manner similar to Pikmin.

It's yet to be determined if Advance Wars: Under Fire will support multiple players, or what sort of abilities the COs in the game will have. Existing artwork shows what looks like six new COs; the characters from the GBA games haven't been seen at all (one of them was seen in the press conference video giving the player advice). It's probably unlikely that Under Fire will tie into the same storyline. It's not coming out until next year, though, so anything could change in that time.