Although Advance Wars 2 barely added any new units, AW DS adds new units for land, sea, air, and, uh, rail:

There's one more kind of new unit that shows up in the Campaign that can't be bought. That surprise won't be spoiled here! There's also a new capture-able property, a radio tower; the more of these that are controlled, the stronger the attacks of the army.

The new campaign has no failings and introduces the player to the new aspects of AW: DS, including dual-screen battles and time and turn-limit battles. It's about on par with the AW 1 & 2 campaigns (with some cool storyline twists) and gets the player started on using CO pairs pretty quickly. One difference is that COs can also gain ranks and equip up to four bonus abilities, like an extra 5% direct offense or defense, extra power on certain terrains, extra sight range in fog of war, etc. These are entirely optional, of course. They're useful for 'tweaking' a CO for a certain campaign map, but probably aren't preferable for a balanced multiplayer game. They can be turned off or rearranged before any battle. As an extra bonus, ranking a CO all the way up to level ten will earn a new costume (not just new colors, but additional art). The prime reason for this is to make Grit look like Shaggy.

The hard campaign, however, exceeds all expectations in its awesomeness. Of course, it's tougher and has enemy units deployed in all sorts of uncomfortable places, but you can use any CO that's been unlocked, even from the Black Hole crew.

Aside from the campaign, there's a new Survival mode. It's really more like a ranking course; the player battles through about a dozen maps with a limit on turns, money, or time, and gets a final grade and a bunch of unlock points at the end. Harder versions can be unlocked too. The turn limit course seems pretty easy, but the time and money courses are rough, probably a bit tougher than the Hard Campaign, even.

Good ol' Trial mode (War Room in the US version) allows the player to select a map and duke it out with the CPU for a grade and unlock points. However, if the player only chooses a single CO and/or opts not to use rank upgrades, they can get up to 2.5 times the regular unlock/experience points. That's extra sweet, because rank upgrades are for wusses.

Along the lines of Trial mode, there's Free Mode where you can set up any kind of battle that you want or do single-DS turn-based multiplayer. It’s pretty considerate of the designers to still include that for people with friends who do not own their own DS systems because their dog ate it. Like I always say, better buy two or three, just in case.

The single-player version of Combat mode is a great way to earn thousands and thousands of unlock points fast. It's really just a simple action game. The player can choose 20,000g worth of units (from Mech, Recon, Small Tank, and Artillery) and start in on the eight missions. There are three difficulty levels, and the last one is really, really hard. It's terribly addictive, though. And in the multiplayer version, up to eight players can blow each other up. Controlling the unit with the pad and firing at any direction on the stylus works surprisingly well

That's only about half of the options on the menu. There's the good ol' Wars Shop where you buy stuff from Hachi. There's History to examine the statistics. There's Wireless multiplayer (with Normal, Dual Screen, Map Trade, Combat, Download, and Message macros to edit for in-game use). Also, there are the Sound Room (there are 67 songs in this game!), Gallery, and Edit mode. Editing maps is now much easier thanks to the stylus, and you can trade them with your friends, too.

Advance Wars: Dual Strike's tag-team system definitely adds an extra layer of strategy -- a prudent move for a strategy game, right? Along with entirely too many game modes and wireless multiplayer, well, that's enough gameplay to ruin a human brain. Force rank abilities probably weren't really necessary, but it hasn't really broken the game, either. AW: DS comes highly recommended for fans of the series, and hey, everyone else, too. Click here to order the U.S. version from Lik-Sang!