Tiny Metal

AREA 35’s first UNTIES title is a solid effort. Despite its simplistic looks is a game that demands a good amount of planning and strategy. Tiny Metal will definitely be familiar to Nintendo fans who are still looking for their next Advance Wars fix. While gamers new to the genre will find that Tiny Metal is a nice diversion for all those AAA games that haven’t lived up to the hype. To still a phase from the old 16-bit console wars, AREA 35 does what Nintendont.

Tiny Metal is a fantastic tactical experience that is great for newcomers to strategy and expert warriors who survived Advance Wars. With its old-fashioned presentation and refined gameplay make for a solid battlefield experience worth delving into.

Tiny Metal’s simplified strategy and delightful tone scratch an itch that has been festering since Nintendo’s Advance Wars series reached a ceasefire in 2008.  Battalions of adorable tanks and warplanes engage in a series of turn-based encounters that seem like the opening salvos of an epic tactical war. Unfortunately, Tiny Metal’s action fails to evolve past the basics; its shallow strategy offers some cheap thrills, but its lack of depth is boring for battle-hardened tacticians.

Metal militia.

It's Advance Wars for a new generation as Japanese anime characters collide with adorable 3D units for turn-based combat.

No matter how many years pass, mankind never seems to be able to leave war behind as the solution to many of its problems. Whether it's for resources, living space or anything else, man always seems to be ready to embrace weapons and start off the killings. This is pretty much what happens in Tiny Metal, a Japanese developed turn-based strategy game highly reminiscent of the Advance War series by Intelligent Systems, who's known mostly known for the Fire Emblem series.

Overall, Tiny Metal is a very promising, and likely the best, attempt at replicating the successful Advance Wars formula that fans have been looking for. Although multiplayer has yet to be added to the game, and there are some minor performance issues, each of these can be taken care of with a few patches. This puts the game in a position to be great after a bit more work has been done to it, or to make an easily improved sequel.

Underneath a forgettable campaign and unimpressive AI, Tiny Metal houses the seed of a really deep and entertaining multiplayer wargame. But until a head-to-head mode is added, it’s not much more than a set of unchallenging training scenarios broken up by far too much overwrought dialogue. I had plenty of fun with it, but didn’t get the kind of edge-of-my-seat decision-making moments that turned the tide of a difficult battle I could find in similar games. I’d recommend delaying your enlistment until all the pieces are in place.

Right now, Tiny Metal feels slightly undercooked. It has the strong foundations of a game that could be great, but is let down at almost every turn.

Tiny Metal is a military themed, turn-based, strategy game similar to Advance Wars. The game is broken up into levels, each one taking roughly 30 minutes, requiring you to clear the map of your foe’s military or conquer their headquarters to win.

While any number of strategy games are guilty of the same thing, where military superiority and strength in numbers is a one-size-fits-all key to victory, it’s something that I never felt was much of a problem in Advance Wars, where everything was balanced so that while commanding greater resources enabled you to win, it still didn’t guarantee it. Unfortunately Tiny Metal has none of that balance, and capturing enough bases generally ensures that you’re able to regularly spit out a tide of the most powerful unit types with which you can crush the opposition. The fact that the enemy AI doesn’t ...