Advance Wars: Days of Ruin

today, for the first time in about a month i picked up my Nintendo DS with a fresh, brand new cartridge to insert into the shiny DS Lite. the game you might ask? Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. the reason its been so long since i've dusted off my Nintendo DS is mostly due to the amount of [amazing] games the holiday season brought for all the home consoles, but enough of that, lets get to the game! Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is the latest installment in the Advance Wars series and it does not disappoint. let me break it down;

Plot: one word, dark. about 90% of mankind has been killed off following a massive meteor strike, a dust cloud is blocking all sunlight, scattered survivors salvaging every morsel of food thats left. as in most post-apocalyptic tales, in the beginning of the game, the enemies largely consist of hostile factions taking advantage of the loss of laws and such. its a pretty good story, but i'm not going to lie, the dialog can get pretty bad, still, its a big improvement from Advance Wars: Duel Strike.

Gameplay: even though their are some new features, at the core, the gameplay is an update to Advance Wars: Duel Strike. mostly small updates, changes in unit prices, some units have been renamed, some new units [the duster, the bike, etc.] but, in order to keep this as simple and to the point as possible, i'll just give a short description: via many smaller updates to the battle system, you'll find that Advance Wars: Days of Ruin has a tougher, more realistic style then previous Advance Wars games. still, if you liked the other Advance Wars titles, you're gonna like this one.

Wi-Fi/Local Mulitiplayer: is pretty impressive. uploading you're own maps for others to play and rate, online battles with or without friend codes [you're choice!]. local mulitiplayer is still very good, although you're friends will need carts of their own in order to play.