Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising

Another top game in my opinion, one of the best for gba. It's one of my favourite games because of its graphics, game-play, length, strategy factor and the possibility to play with up to 4 friends on one device.

Graphics
Graphic is awesome: it's incredibly colorful, and the characters are really well defined and cute. The units are slightly different on each side (as you can see from the pictures) and they are the perfect example of what you can do with pixelart: really cool vehicles and infantry.

Overall maps, world view and backgrounds are very nice, i think one of the best graphics on a gba game. Animations are also great, pumping you up when you use a superpower (each character has his own) and making you angry when the enemy uses his own.

Sound
Each CO has a particular music, i really liked the different style of the bad guy themes... their outlook with that dark, violent music makes a perfect combihttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifnation and gives the idea of evil twisted enemies. After some time tough, some melodies can get repetitive (like Sonja theme)

Game-play
The game logic is really interesting, pure strategy similar to a chess game, in turns. Each unit of the game has different statistics like speed, power, attack range,
The game misses fights between the 4 countries because they are too busy fighting with black hole, but this happens only in the campaign mode since in skirmish mode the player can experiment every kind of combination between the many maps, weather and CO for a infinite number of different battles. Fog of war, if activated, changes completely the game-play and strategies because of the recon activity. If you have tried Advance Wars: Dual Strike the combinations are ever more because you play as 2 different CO at one time; but that is another game, and in my opinion it's even too variable (with strange settings/COs and battles you can have light tanks beating large tanks in one shot, or infantry destroying helicopters and such; and rules change each turn because you can switch from one CO to another... yeah it's a mess).


CONCLUSION
An awesome game, simple and complex at the same time, enjoyable and with a good strategic factor that can only be good to your brain. Longevity: impressive because of the many combinations (like chess), it can be played fast and relaxed or slow and concentrated to obtain a higher score. If you like chess, Metal Slug and command and conquer, you will love this game.