Advance Wars is known for its power as one of the best handheld strategy games and everyone knows how addictive it is. Such shock I heard when I heard the news it was being released on the DS. The innovative way Nintendo utilised its technology via touch screen to make an already strong franchise, a franchise close to perfection was utterly superb. As with any Advance Wars game, you always start with a training mission in campaign mode, one of the various modes that are contained within the game. But before this, you're treated to a little scene which tells you what has happened. You're in Omega Land, a ravaged continent trodden upon by the foot of the Black Hole onslaught, which has lead to Orange Star, Blue Moon, Yellow Comet and Green Earth to join forces, in order to push away the common foe. To begin the campaign mode you have a mission which is quickly introduced by the Commanding Officer (Or CO for short) Nell, who is talking to her Sister, Rachel about the current situation at hand and how Rachel is left in charge. You're then introduced to the CO Jake, who is the main man in this beast of a game, attached with a determined spirit and a will to do what it takes to save the continent.

So, into the game, now. It's gone into its original 2D form with simple icons for buildings, units, land, etc. which all look miles better than the predecessor Advance Wars 2: Black Hole Rising. You're told which units belong to you and how you can move them; for this whole game, you'll be the Orange Star troops. You don't use Blue Moon or Green Earth troops unless it's a 4 way battle, which is very rare during campaign mode. Yellow Comet doesn't even make an appearance unfortunately; it would have been nice to plaster the map in some yellow doom here and there as well. The enemy troops for this mission and this mission alone are Blue Moon troops, every other mission is against Black Hole units.

To order a unit around, simply tap the unit and a coloured section will come up; this is your movement range. Now as you probably already know that certain terrain types impede movement. These terrain types are plains, trees, mountains, rivers and of course, reefs. Roads and the sea do not impeded any units at all. Certain rules however apply to which unit can traverse which terrain though, i.e. tanks can't go into mountains, infantry can't go into the sea, etc. which is made clear when you tap a unit, because spaces you can't go on wont be highlighted. So in the mission, you're dealt a tank, a mech and an infantry unit.

This brings in the basics of moving and direct attacking. So if you were to move your mech into the nearby trees to attack the enemy tank, you would do this by tapping your mech, tapping a space inside the highlighted area and then selecting a command. In the command section, you can order your units to do one of several things. These include attacking, waiting, repairing, supplying, loading and unloading. However, for the time being all you can do is order attack and wait. So tap your command, I advise attack in this case and watch a little cutscene showing how well your troops did in this attack. But you don't have to attack to see how well you did.

You can judge before hand how well you'll do by the intel box in the bottom left/right hand side of the map when you hover over a unit and/or attack. This intel displays how much damage you'll do, what your defence is, what unit you've selected, etc. and can give you an idea on how well you perform in an attack and maybe how much damage you'll take, judging by current defence. Defence in this game comes from terrain too. So moving in the trees to carry out this attack is a wise move as it gives you two defence. Another example of terrain giving good defence would be your own HQ, which offers 4 defence, which is quite handy when you're capturing/defending the HQ. So after you've attacked the enemy, little icons are displayed on the unit on the bottom right corner of it. This is unit HP. The tank you just attacked should be displaying a number between 4 and 6 now and your mech between 8 and 10 HP. This signifies how strong a unit is, or how weak it is. If there is no number, the unit is at 10 HP. A next wise move to make would be select your own tank and then move it. The tank now displays how it is impeded by terrain' the trees stop the tank from progressing as you would. However, you can roll right into the trees by the tank you just attacked and attack with your own tank. If you should choose to do just that, your tank will destroy the enemy tank and then that unit will disappear. Once destroyed, units cannot come back, so move strategically if you wish to keep your units. Another point worth mentioning is that now in this game you can skip battle animations. This proves quite a good thing and a nice way to shorten battle length, because it was painful to endure every battle animation for a 10 HP on 1 HP tank battle. Now you tap the screen and you don't have to watch the pathetic battles.

Next what you can do is capture a building with your infantry unit. To do this, move on an enemy or a neutral building ' enemy buildings will be black (In this case blue) and neutral buildings are shown as grey buildings. To capture, once you have moved onto a building, you then select capture from the command menu. As you would have seen, an animation shows the infantry capturing the building and the number 20 us reduced to 10. This is because all buildings have capture points worth 20 and every time you capture, you reduce the capture points by the infantry's HP, so at best an infantry can capture a building in two days. Once the building is captured, it turns your army's colour and then from the next day your earn funds.

Funds are displayed on the top right/left corner of the bottom screen or on the top screen on the left, underneath your CO picture. Funds are important, because on a deployment map you build units using your funds. But on a pre-deployed map, funds go towards repairing units. This is also where cities come in handy, because when you place a ground unit on them, they restore 2 HP worth to that unit every day, using your funds.

This now brings upon the different units within the game. You have three types of units, ground, sea and air. In these different types comes an array of awesome units to be used at your leisure to win this war. To deploy units of each type, you must first have the correct funding and then you must have appropriate buildings to make these units in. These buildings are bases, ports and airports. When building a unit, you build one for each deployment property you own and you can then move that unit the next day, then build another unit in that property and so forth ' This is what's so appealing to the game and what makes it stand out from most strategies. You can build your own destruction. In most RTS games, people have split second thinking as to what they make (If they can make units or something similar, of course) then they're pushed for time, whereas in Advance Wars, you take your time, as no-one's going anywhere until you end your turn, so you can feel free as to what you do and how long it takes you ' if you're not particularly sure of a move, go move other things and then come back to the move you was/wasn't going to do before and see if it could possibly change things. It's like chess, only one-hundred times better.

The sleek design of all the units in the battle animations are one of the highlights; they're much better looking than predecessors to the game and they feel more realistic and flowing, rather than wooden animation and an image that looks like it's just come out of MSPaint. It feels smoother and definitely feels more like a showdown. The terrain has also had a graphical boost and looks much nicer as well. You'll enjoy the way the game feels in these animations, even with such 2 dimensional play when moving units about, because it builds up an atmosphere and kind of puts you there in the game and it's because of this fact that it puts you there in the war that the game doesn't feel so wooden, but more exciting if anything.

As for how COs help the game, during battle, they'll accumulate stars, which are shown beneath their CO picture. These stars show how much power they have before they can use their CO power. Or better yet, their super CO power. Once you've filled enough stars (The first to fill would be the smaller stars) you can click on the menu button and select power, which then can alter the course of battle. For example, Jake's CO power is Beat Down, which increases the firing range of indirect vehicles by one space and increases movement range for all vehicles by one space. But should you fill all the stars underneath his name, you can activate the super CO power, which is Block Rock, which is like Beat Down, but many times more powerful ' it increases range of indirect vehicles by one space, it increases movement range on all vehicles by two spaces and increase every units' attack when they battle on plains. This boosts the attack so much more than a CO power, so it's a necessity to use your super CO power. There is also one other power ' Tag Team power. This is when you have two COs under your control. When you fill up all your stars for each CO, you can activate the Tag Team power, which is when each CO uses their super power in one turn. So we have Jake and Rachel under our belt, activate the Tag Team power and it'll show you how much extra power is given out of 130 (This power varies due to CO chemistry) and then you use a turn for one CO. Once done with that CO, you then pick the switch option instead of end and you use the other CO's power to unleash ultimate devastation.

There has also been new units introduced; the most memorable being the stealth fighter. It's such an amazing new unit. It functions like a sub. But it's an air unit. So you can hide it, making it invulnerable to every unit except fighters (fighters being the cruisers of the air). Other notable changes to units are with in fact cruisers as they can now fire on ships; this makes the sea battles so much more strategic and interesting. One of the other most memorable units involved is of course the megatank. It's more powerful than a tank, an MD tank and a neotank put together ' it can absolutely demolish everything in its way. It's the most powerful unit developed to date and the good news is that it's available when you get to the Green Earth COs in campaign mode, which is about mission 15, so you haven't got that long to wait until you get the powerhouse. Another good thing about the game is that Black Hole doesn't use these weapons against you during campaign ' and you can steal weapons plans for all their new weapons during the game. So you're at an advantage all the time, whilst you have some of the good weapons at your side. Although not everything is all smile for the Allied Nations as megatanks can be destroyed easy, being very venerable to air units and indirect attack., so this shows how balanced the game is and it just doesn't take strategic power to win the fight.

As for the roster of COs, you get a lot of different characters, all with unique personality which really draws you into the game; this is because you can imagine what's really going on, almost as if you were there with the COs, even though the dialogue is wooden and just text at the bottom or top of the screen. All the abilities with the COs vary too. It's a case of picking the right Co to suit the situation. Every CO also has a weak point though. Take Max for example. He's an awesome direct combat CO, but then again he's naff when it comes to indirect combat having their attack range reduced by one. Another CO with good notable skills is Sonja. She's excellent with intel, so she hides unit Hp from opponents which is a bugger if you're facing Sonja in particular. Another notable strong point is that she's good with Fog of War (Or FoW for short) where all her units have increased vision range. But, she's not all that good in combat. So each CO is weighed down with strengths and weaknesses that make this game a whole lot better. Partnering the right COs as mentioned before is strategic too, as you can pair Max (Good with direct combat; weak with indirect combat) with Grit (Good with indirect combat; weak with direct combat) making them a perfect match. Another good thing about this game is when you take COs into battle, you can rank them up. This unlocks new abilities, such as reducing deployment cost, increasing the speed of repairs, etc. and makes using COs a more worthwhile experience as it's your own CO now.

As said earlier, Fog of War is present in this game. It's a lot better in comparison with predecessors where FoW didn't apply to the enemy which was absolutely pathetic. However, now it does, so FoW is so much more enjoyable, rather than a painful experience where it's a game of hide and seek where the opposition can see your every move. Certain terrain still hides you in this game, this terrain would be reefs and trees. Air units still can be seen if you attempt to hide them in these types of terrain, so it opens up a more strategy involved route when dealing with airborne assault in FoW.

When you start the game up, you're taken to an easy to use interface where all you have to do is tap to select and you're away. The modes selectable are campaign, war room, versus, survival and combat. They all each have their own specific idea for you to make war in. For example, in combat you're introduced into real time strategy. It's a lovely addition to the game albeit extremely hard to get the hang of. You pick units out of 20000 funds and then you go to war with other COs who have a huge army in this game. It works pretty well with the stylus which makes it a really good game to play when you're bored of the main story.

There are also other little things during the game like earning medals, customizing your COs, making maps and customizing your background. All these are unlocked from either getting high ranks on COs or earning enough points to buy things in Hachi's battlemaps shop. There are total 300 medals during this game and to earn them all you have to do things like produce 100 tanks or destroy 20 black cannons. It's a good idea too and makes you have some sort of aspiration to do things in the game, rather than do campaign countless times.

The little things like mapmaker are also very good. People can enjoy battling it out on their home made map. Some very interesting four player maps can be made sing this neat little function. Unfortunately only three maps can be produced/kept at anytime, thus limiting how many maps you can make, obviously, which is a real draw-back if you want to make fun maps, but keep your good ones.

Overall, Advance Wars: Dual Strike is a charm of a game. It has all its great modes to choose from and has all its playability. It will last you a very long guaranteed as earning all 300 medals and ranking every CO all the way to attain every skill for them can take hours, maybe days. If you want a strategy game that'll keep you interested until 2010, Advance Wars is your game. If you're looking for a difficult, yet highly addictive game, Advance Wars is your best bet. Advance Wars isn't the greatest game in the world. It has some malfunctions. I in particular have experience bad times during the game where battle animations didn't work, then enemy units didn't move correctly and even in some extreme cases the bottom screen crashes and goes black, leaving the game empty with your CO's theme still playing, which is costly if you wish not for your data to be unsaved. I'm scoring this game 9/10. It's an amazing, addictive and very, very tricky at times but with it's stupid flaws that ruin it, it gets marked down, but these flaws don't obstruct the fact it's one of the best titles that will ever enter your DS slot.