Simply throwing money at the war won’t give you any easy victories, though. As with Advance Wars, you can capture neutral cities in order to generate money, which goes back into manufacturing troops and vehicles via the factories scattered across some maps. Your goal varies from stage-to-stage, though the objective usually revolves around wiping out your enemy’s troops and / or capturing their headquarters. There’s really an impressive range of weaponry to toy with here. You orchestrate the actions of infantry, gunships, carriers, ballistas, and tons more. Both gameplay modes put you in command of a large stable of mechanized soldiers and war machines. Warbits has a single-player campaign as well as an online and local asynchronous multiplayer option. Nobody gets hurt except for on-screen simulations (and maybe some hurt feelings as a result of the trash-talking). The game takes place in a future that’s already been ravaged at least once by warfare, leading the world’s denizens to settle their differences in virtual combat. Unlike Advance Wars, no humans are harmed in the warring of Warbits.

It looks like an early Advance War title, it plays like one, and it even has the same dry sense of humor. There’s no Advance War title on the horizon, however, so I can confidently offer a mobile alternative from Risky Lab called Warbits. At the same time, some of us are pining for military might in lieu of sword-and-sorcery, and disposable, nameless units in lieu of heroic names and faces. The Fire Emblem series is amazing, and the latest installments are stellar. The Nintendo 3DS, on the other hand, has been dominated by Intelligent Systems’ other strategy darling, Fire Emblem. Throughout the lifespan of the Game Boy Advance and the Nintendo DS, we came to count on a steady trickle of military-oriented turn-based strategy games from Intelligent Systems.

Have you ever stopped whatever you’re doing and said to yourself, “My God, it’s been eight years since we last saw an Advance Wars game?” If not, make a point of doing so in the near future, because it’s kind of a mind-blowing realization. Difficult to remember troops' strengths and weaknesses.

Warbits skirmish walkthrough