Wargroove’s capsule strategy is held back by a few major problems
by Amr (@siegarettes)
- Wargroove
- Developers: Chucklefish
- Publishers: Chucklfish
- PC, Switch, PS4, Xbox One
I love Wargroove. At least, when it isn’t seriously pissing me off. When it’s in the groove, it sets up wonderful capsule strategy scenarios. Each of these make me consider the terrain, the set of units I’m restricted to and forces me to experiment and make hard choices to overcome the enemy. The wonderful animations and lovingly rendered maps enhance every victory and mistake, making me hold my breath as I hope that I’ve made the right move.
All of this helps Wargroove perfectly capture the appeal of the old Advance Wars style strategy games. It’s a refreshing return whose capsule battles generally feel more accessible to people who aren’t strategy mavens. And yet, it isn’t the rousing success it should be, thanks to some BIG problems that soured any high points.
Most of these problems rear up as the map size expands. The limited movement speed and micro-management focus work fine in small maps only a few screens wide, but anything else quickly becomes subject to a lot of busywork and downtime. A 3 space movement speed might be fine in a compact space, but otherwise I ended up tediously dragging a squad little by little into place over several turns. Wagons can mitigate this, but they at best use up two turns to get a single unit into place.
The micro focus turns large maps really unwieldy. Wargroove is game where placing a unit a single space to the left or right can make a big difference, and on large maps it can be easy to get sloppy and make that mistake when I’m trying to get through the tedium of moving 20 units and making sure my barracks are producing the right units. Wargroove is at its best when its about making important decisions in small skirmishes, not dragging units into the fight over several turns.
Later, more resource focused maps suffer even more. Units lose fighting power with every hit, so a constant stream of fresh units is needed to keep up a strong front. So fights turn into wars of attrition where even when I had a big lead, I still needed to fight another 10 or 15 turns, shepherding units to and from the frontline and hoping I didn’t misplace one, have them die and need to wait a few more turns for their replacement.
Each of these problems is exasperated by the inability to save, rewind, or even undo a move. If I suddenly realized a better solution part way through moving my units, or even accidentally clicked “Wait” instead of “Attack” I’d have to play through the rest of the turn unable to correct it. Sometimes I’d have a ranged unit attack, but not realize I was one space off from where they could use their ranged attack, and instead they’d run up and melee the enemy, putting them into severe danger. Or I’d miss one of the dozen enemies on a large map while I checked if a space was safe, then have my whole strategy fall apart because of it.
Half an hour’s progress could be wiped just like that, and there’s no way to get back to that point except to tediously set everything up again from the start. It’s like performing a Chess opening, except the opening takes 20 minutes so you can play for 5. A single save before a crucial point could have saved a lot of time, but Wargroove remains so steadfast in imitating its predecessors that it won’t budge.
It does a serious disservice to the game that’s there. The charming animations, the cool battle sequences, and the funny dialogue–all of it becomes small annoyances that waste time. Maybe they’re fun the first time, but when I’m on the second hour of retrying the same map I never want to see them ever again. And of course there’s no way to quickly skip dialogue.
So instead of experimenting and trying new strategies I ended up playing conservatively and sticking only to what I knew worked. All the unit variety and possible synergies went unexplored because there’s just way too much at stake when I can lose a whole night of progress with one bad move. It sapped a lot of my good will towards a game that I was often deeply enamored with. Maybe future updates will address these problems, but for nowWargroove is a game that I desperately want to love, which keeps shutting the door on my face.