I’ve been really excited to play Wargroove 2 because I liked the original game, but I wanted to love it. It was a blend of Advance Wars and early Fire Emblem games, a turn-based tactics affair that saw you spreading out across dinky grid-based maps, gathering resources, turning them into units and exploring the dense rock-paper-scissors potential of the various ensuing matchups. It was a loving and thoughtful thing, but it felt a little dry to me – a little too studious when it came to its inspirations.
That’s just me, of course! Other more intelligent reviewers absolutely adored it. And as for me, I still want to adore it. So here comes Wargroove 2. It’s another chance for me to fall in love. I’ve had a pretty generous demo build for a few days that I’ve been tinkering around with. So far I’ve had a brilliant time.
Wargroove 2 is an incremental sequel. New factions, new commanders, and new multi-tier Grooves, which was the original game’s name for CO powers. But moment-to-moment there’s lots to find familiar. You move about the map, factoring in the range of movement and the range of attack of each unit. There’s fog of war – and night, now, which I believe is new. It’s still about using the correct unit you have against the enemy unit it’s most effective against, while making sure that you have resources coming in from your village that allow you to spit out new units faster than you lose old units.
