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.
Wargroove 2Publisher: ChucklefishDeveloper: Chucklefish, RobotalityPlatform: Played on PCAvailability: Coming 5th October to PC and Switch.
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.
The tutorial campaign was a lovely refresher in all this stuff, and also introduced the Faahri Republic, a mouse army that I’ve been controlling in the first main campaign. One of Wargroove’s greatest ideas is critical hits, which are the chance to do extra damage with a unit if you deploy it in a certain way. Archers go critical if you fire them without moving them. One of my melee units went critical if I positioned it next to my hero. It was lovely to re-learn all this stuff which I had completely forgotten about, and discover afresh what felt like a secondary puzzle layer to every encounter. (A third layer, if you take into account the terrain puzzles each map represents.)