Nintendo’s Advance Wars series was a staple of strategic gaming throughout the 2000s (and far longer than that in Japan), bringing a colorful aesthetic and small-scale maps to the world of turn-based military tactics. It’s more or less been supplanted by the RPG flavour of Fire Emblem these days, and of course neither series has come to PC. But it looks like we’ve got a suitable spiritual successor in the form of Tiny Metal.
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The game wears its inspiration on its sleeve, and even though Tiny Metal is taking the cartoonish aesthetic into the third dimension, there’s no escaping the Advance Wars-style look, from the anime-style commanders to the precise way infantry units square off and battle one another.
The game features a full story campaign with 19 missions, with powerful hero units that grow in strength over the course of the campaign. Standard units grow more powerful as they gain experience, and you can take advantage of a positional attack system to outmaneuver your enemies for additional damage. On top of the campaign, there are 56 skirmish maps for AI battles, with online multiplayer to be added in an upcoming update.
Tiny Metal comes from Japanese studio AREA 35, and is one of the first titles to be published under the Unties label, a new Sony brand publishing titles for non-PlayStation platforms. Tiny Metal is available now on Steam for $24.99 / £19.99 / €24.99. (And for a more traditional take on the formula, keep an eye on the upcoming Wargroove.)