I don't play many turn-based multiplayer games on Steam, which is why it took until Wargroove for me to discover the fantastic feature Steam calls Turn Notifications. Turn notifications are exactly what they sound like: Little pop-ups that tell you when you can make a move in a turn-based game. The pop-ups look just like the ones Steam uses to tell you a friend has just launched a game, or it's finished downloading something. This feature has existed since 2014! I had no idea, but it's supported by board games like Carcassonne and strategy games like Frozen Synapse. In Wargroove, it's implemented in a wonderful way that reminds me of how I played Advance Wars with my friends in the early 2000s.
I played a lot of Advance Wars solo, in both Game Boy Advance games and both Nintendo DS games. But I also played hours of multiplayer with friends by passing a single GBA around. I'd take a turn and hand it off, chat with whoever wasn't up next. Maybe we'd be watching TV or listening to music. 10 minutes later the GBA would come back around to me, and I'd survey the map to see what happened after I made my last moves. We'd play this way until the batteries gave out, and probably never actually finish a game. It was still fun.
I saw "asynchronous play" listed as a bullet point for Wargroove, but didn't think it could replicate that same experience online. It does, thanks to two ingredients: Server-hosted multiplayer games, and Steam's turn notifications. I can host a game and invite friends, but it's not actually being hosted on my PC. That means I can take a turn, close Wargroove, and go about my business. When other players complete their turns and it's back to me, Steam pops up a notification and I can hop back in.
I could even have a few different multiplayer sessions going and get notifications for each of them. Thankfully, Steam compiles these on a profile page and even includes a button to launch the game right there (though its hooks aren't advanced enough to take you straight into the match itself). It's like playing a mobile game like Words With Friends, except it's, y'know, War With Friends.
Of course, there's nothing quite like playing a game in a room together with friends, and the true approximation of that childhood experience would be playing Wargroove on a Nintendo Switch (or laptop), passing the system around the room. But the friends I once played Advance Wars with all live hours and timezones away. We work different hours and days. Having notifications that can keep a game alive is pretty much the next best thing, and makes me way more likely to play Wargroove's multiplayer.
Wee fixes and handy “quality of life” features are in the pipeline for Wargroove, developers Chucklefish say, with vague plans for a full-on content update and some DLC further down the way. Chucklefish laid out their plans yesterday, also noting that sales of their Advance Wars-y turn-based strategy game between Friday’s launch and Sunday had “already covered the cost of development.” Our Brendan’s Wargroove review says it’s a nice and cheery strat ’em up and it’s claimed territory in the latest Steam charts, so good, good things are coming to a good game people like.
Chucklefish, the developer of Starbound and publisher of Stardew Valley, just released their latest game Wargroove. It's turn-based tactics with a strong vibe of Advance Wars only in a fantasy setting where one of the units is adorable dogs. You can read our review here.
On the Chucklefish blog they've announced their post-release plans for Wargroove, which in the immediate future includes a patch that's currently going through approval. It'll fix bugs like online spectating not working on Fog of War maps.
Beyond that there will be a fix for various quality-of-life issues people have been complaining about, like a way to set fast map movement to be always on and faster ways to skip battle scenes. In the long term they're looking at "a larger content update, DLC and more." Also mentioned in the blog post is the fact that, though the game's only been out since February 1, it's already covered development costs.
Chucklefish have been on Reddit too, doing an AMA about Wargroove's release. In response to a question about the decision to have dogs flee from combat when defeated, they gave this response: "A lot of the motivation for it came from the feedback that we had at conventions, with both players and press expressing sadness when they saw the dogs die. We agreed that none of us wanted to see dogs dying in the game, and just made them run away instead." So that's nice.
Wargroove's map editor is simple-to-use, but lacks a few amenities. For one, you can't open up the codex from the editor, so you can't scroll through unit or terrain types to see their stats. Compounding the issue, the unit icons are tiny pixel nuggets, and it can be hard to tell what kind of unit you're selecting.
I wanted a reference guide to use while working in the map maker, so here it is. I've used the Cherrystone unit names and sprites, but have included the faction-specific icons and names above each entry. Despite the different names, each faction's units are identical.
Below the unit stats, I've included the terrain stats and a few map making tips. If you're not already war grooving, check out our review.
Wargroove unit stats
Swordsman
Cost: 100 | Movement: 4 (Land) | Sight: 4 | CapturesCritical hit: When adjacent to its commander.
The most basic combat unit. Good for cleaning up infantry and capturing towns.
Pikeman
Cost: 150 | Movement: 3 (Land) | Sight: 4 | CapturesCritical hit: When adjacent to another allied pikeman.
A strong, cheap unit that is best deployed in groups and is strong against horsemen.
Battlepup
Cost: 200 | Movement: 5 (Land) | Sight: 4 Critical hit: When another dog is adjacent to the target.
Strong against ground units, low defense.
Ranger
Cost: 500 | Movement: 3 (Land) | Sight: 5 | Range: 3CapturesCritical hit: When unit has not moved during the current turn.
Good for defense, or weakening captured buildings at range. Weak against most attacks.
Alchemist
Cost: 400 | Movement: 5 (Land)| Sight: 4 | CapturesCritical hit: When defense is 3 or higher.
Strong against air units. Can heal allied targets by 20 percent for 300 gold.
Warship
Cost: 900 | Movement: 8 (Sea)| Sight: 5 | Range: 2-4Critical hit: When on a beach tile.
Strong against ground units. Cannot attack air units.
Harpoon Ship
Cost: 550| Movement: 4 (Sea)| Sight: 6 | Range: 3-6Critical hit: When on a reef tile.
Strong against air units. Cannot attack ground units.
Emberwing
Cost: 1250| Movement: 8 (Ground) | Sight: 6Critical hit: When target is on a road.
Strong against all ground and water units—weaker against anti-air units, and cannot attack other air units.
Knight
Cost: 600| Movement: 6 (Ground)| Sight: 4Critical hit: When it moves six spaces before attacking.
Powerful critical. Strong defense, but takes 70 damage from spearmen.
Trebuchet
Cost: 900| Movement: 6 (Ground)| Sight: 4 | Range: 2-5Critical hit: When attacking at max range.
Cannot move and attack in the same turn. Strong against ground units and water units. Cannot attack air units.
Merfolk
Cost: 250| Movement: 5 (Water/Land)| Sight: 4 | Range: 2 | CapturesCritical hit: When on river or sea tiles.
Amphibious. Low damage.
Sea Turtle
Cost: 400| Movement: 12 (Sea)| Sight: 6Critical hit: When on deep sea tiles.
Naval unit. Can only attack other naval units.
Witch
Cost: 800| Movement: 7 (Air) | Sight: 6 Critical hit: When target is not adjacent to a witch of its own.Ability: Hex deals 10 percent damage to all enemy types in a large radius. Costs 300 gold.
Direct attacks are air-to-air only.
Harpy
Cost: 600| Movement: 5 (Air) | Sight: 5Critical hit: When above a mountain.
Air unit. Can attack all unit types for medium to low damage.
Golem
Cost: 1200| Movement: 5 (Ground) | Sight: 3Critical hit: When at or below 40 percent health.
Attacks most ground and amphibious units for 100-plus damage. Does 45 damage to units of its own type, 85 damage to horsemen, 75 damage to wagons, and 85 damage to buildings.
Every piece of terrain has defensive and movement properties. For instance, deep sea tiles hinder movement less than shallow sea tiles, and reef tiles (which look like rocks) hinder movement greatly but provide extra defense.
Decorations, however, have no effect on movement or defense, and can be passed through, even if they look similar to terrain tiles (eg, ocean rocks, which look more like obstacles than reefs).
Below are all of the terrain types. Click here for the full-sized image.
Map making basics
Map types: If you want to test your map against an AI opponent, you'll need to change the map type to Scenario in the Map Properties settings. It defaults to Skirmish, which cannot include AI opponents.
Scrolling around: Keep trying to click the middle mouse button to move your view around? I'm afraid it's WASD to do that, which is a bit cumbersome since the keyboard isn't needed for anything else.
Changing unit properties: The dialogue box icon in the tool bar (on the right, next to the options button) allows you to select placed units and buildings to adjust their health and other options, such as which units barracks can recruit.
Deleting units: To delete a unit, you need to be in the unit placement mode. Instead of left clicking to drop the unit you're holding, right click on the space of an existing unit to remove it. Annoyingly, this only works if it's possible to place the unit you're holding in the spot the unit you're deleting occupies. For example, you need to have a water unit selected to delete another water unit.
Using the cutscene editor: It takes a little fiddling, but the cutscene editor is pretty easy to use. For starters, try this:
Select Timeline > New > Create Actor.
Choose an actor.
Click the Settings tab, set movement to 'from left' and unit direction to 'right'.
Select a grid slot near the center of the frame.
Close the event and timeline.
Click 'Playback' (what look like play buttons aren't play buttons).
Your actor should enter from the left and stop at the selected grid slot.
Wargroove is out now, and clearly an Advance Wars game with the serial numbers filed off and replaced with Chucklefish branding. I am entirely> fine with this, and you shouldn’t count that as criticism in the slightest. Clearly inspired by Intelligent Systems’s accessible-but-tough strategy series, Wargroove has a few ideas of its own, and lots of maps, missions and little soldiers to boss around. It also has a playable commander who is a literal dog that just barks and chases its tail adorably, inspiring its men to fight with the strength of gods. Check out the launch trailer below.
It’s very hard not to focus entirely on Cesar, Wargroove’s best boy and commander of his own army of warpups. Yes, dogs in shiny armour are a playable unit in this game. There is no violence against the four-legged soldiers, either—instead of dying, they just run away. If you’re not sold already, one of the other 12 commanders might do the trick. Don’t be fooled by the light-hearted tone, however—Wargroove is filled with creative, demanding challenges.
An easy comparison to reach for is Into The Breach. Both feature direct, turn-based confrontation between two factions who often use the landscape to their advantage. But Wargroove is more in every way; more factions, more units, more map, more more. This could sound overwhelming but getting started is actually really easy.
In the first few missions, as well as the arcade mode, your goal is generally to either defeat the opposing army’s commander or take their fortress. Capturing unallied buildings on the map or taking them from your opponent earns you money, which you can spend on new units or health. The campaign introduces the units one after another and gives you hints as to their use. The first time you’re up against airborne fiends, for example, you also gain ballistas and mages, both excellent against that particular type of enemy. These missions give you time to get to know units and their strengths and weaknesses without being overbearing. Knowing what type of soldier fares best against what enemy is crucial—a soldier with the distinct advantage can often win a battle in one strike. If they don’t, your opponent gets to counter.
Commanders are the most important characters, not only because they’re the strongest and look the coolest, but because each of them has a unique special ability, the so-called groove, which is charged by defeating enemies. Some grooves have defensive capabilities like extra health or defence, some are just good old fashioned special attacks.
While all armies share the same standard units, from small foot soldiers to massive golems and units for sea combat, they all have distinctly different looks that fit each commander and their lands. The people of the Japan-inspired Heavensong Empire build pagodas instead of stone castles, the golem of the Floran plant race looks like a giant tree. In terms of character design and animation, Wargroove is truly a standout.
Command & Conquer
The 30-plus missions of the single-player campaign follow a cute (if not particularly inventive) fantasy story. As well as standard conquering and destruction tasks, you’ll be rescuing prisoners from a fortress or helping refugees flee the site of a battle using wagons. If you prefer a quick challenge, there’s an arcade mode for each commander, and a puzzle mode in which you have to finish a mission within one round.
Wargroove’s weaknesses are its at times crushing difficulty and tendency to drag on. Positioning characters in the right spots for attacks and critical hits is already difficult enough. But Wargroove’s maps are huge, meaning you can spend round after round simply traveling to meet the enemy. It’s not always clear how damage is calculated, and I had to adjust it in the options to have a chance at more than one mission. Maps often have chokepoints such as bridges that can be difficult to circumvent, quickly leading to your soldiers literally queuing to get slaughtered. Flanking enemies is really important—but generating an army large enough to do so takes time.
A unit’s health also acts as its strength, leading to the problem common to games such as The Banner Saga where some characters simply act as cannon fodder, waiting on your replacement unit to make the trek from your barracks over to the actual fight. I’ve restarted some missions because it’s easier to start over than to move your half-dead unit away, heal them and then have them travel somewhere else.
The multiplayer for up to 4 people comes with its own maps and is organised by passing in-game match codes around. In 2-player mode, I found small maps, evenly split in the middle by bridges. Both players pick a commander and start out on equal footing, with the same amount of buildings to conquer on each side, including multiple barracks. In this mode it’s vital to take buildings and retain them, as you’re going for direct confrontation with no way to skirt each other.
Once you hold enough buildings, meaning money, and hold even just one barracks more than the other player, the game is all but decided. Victory is again achieved killing the commander or taking the fort, so real players are more likely than the CPU to aggressively bolster their forces to keep buildings surrounded. Whereas the campaign manages to switch things up, here the simple gameplay works to Wargroove’s detriment—I could have done with more variety to elevate this mode above its arcade counterpart.
Wargroove does invite you to try your own hand at level design as it comes with a brilliant set of highly intuitive tools you can use to create your own maps and even cutscenes. Chucklefish certainly wants you in for the long haul, but as I started skipping lengthy battle animations and came to dread any standard battle, I wondered whether less isn’t sometimes more.
The pikemen have us surrounded, lads. There are enemy trebuchets to the north, knights to the east, and alchemists to the west. I ll be frank, men, this is not great optics. Let s reflect as the battledogs charge in from the south. What could we have done to avoid this? No, I don t know either.
The battles of turn-based tactical throwback Wargroove can be tough, and often rigged to knock you on your heels. Yet it has reverse-engineered the toy soldiering of Advance Wars to a delightful and slightly unsettling degree. Well, in my book (Brendan s Big Book Of Battling) that s mostly a good thing. But it does sometimes mean moments like this, when the pikemen seem destined to kill you.
Halfway through playing WarGroove, which is secretly a pretty odd game, a thought occurred to me which turned out, the more I considered it, to be a pretty odd thought. What if this game isn't made by Chucklefish as the title screen suggests, the thought began. What if it isn't a forensic attempt at reconstructing an Intelligent Systems turn-based tactics game? What if it actually is an Intelligent Systems game, a new one, and this whole Chucklefish smokescreen is some grand social experiment, like that psych study that pretended to be measuring the efficacy of electric shocks on memory or ESP ability or whatever, but was really exploring people's willingness to administer electric shocks to strangers in the first place?
This thought bedded in and refused to go away. What I think I was really pondering, I guess, is the fact that I had approached WarGroove knowing it was a copy of something beloved, and that sense of it being a copy may have been dulling my enjoyment somewhat. Or was it?
WarGroove is a careful reworking of games like Advance Wars and Fire Emblem. It takes the medieval fantasy of Fire Emblem, for example, but then its campaign flows more like Advance Wars, with little of Fire Emblem's cross-mission complexity. It's a very close study: the cheery tiled maps look almost identical to those of Intelligent Systems' games, while unit selection, movement, attack animations and all that jazz are very similar too. It's tempting while playing to work out which of WarGroove's units match up with which of Advance Wars' or Fire Emblems, but more importantly the action feels the same because the underlying principles are the same: capture towns to earn cash that allows you to mint new units from special buildings on the map, work out which units are strong against which other units and try to avoid overextending yourself. CO powers from Advance Wars become the titular WarGrooves here - each commander has a special ability that is charged up through play and will allow you to do something cool like heal everyone within a certain radius or pull friendly skeleton troops out of the earth to fight alongside you - and the battles unfold in a lovely corrugated manner as you press forward and then pause and then press forward again, getting the most out of different terrains like forests and mountains, pushing back fog of war on the maps that have it and, if you are really on top of things, placing units in the precise configurations that allow them to score critical hits.
Here's a pleasant surprise: Wargroove has crossplay.
It's got cross-play across PC, Nintendo Switch and Xbox One, Chucklefish said in a tweet regarding the game's 1st February launch. There's no word on cross-play with PlayStation 4, but that's not much of a surprise given Sony's only recently enabled it, and only for a few games so far - and the PS4 version of Wargroove launches after the other versions at some point, too.
The cross-play function for Wargroove should mean the medieval Advance Wars-style game has as large a pool of multiplayer players as possible for matchmaking, which is of course a good thing for the community and the game itself.
Wargroove, the adorable looking Advance Wars-alike from Chucklefish is set to besiege my heart on February 1st. The fantasy turn-based strategy game was high on my 2018 most-wanted list until it slipped to this year, and I’m excited to see if it passes muster. It may be swapping out cartoony modern armies for fantasy kingdoms, but almost everything else is familiar, right down to the battle animations and a range of playable commanders (one of which is a dog) with their own perks. Below, a release date trailer that could only be more anime if it had lyrics to sing along to.
