While it’s almost 20 years since the world saw a brand new Advance Wars game (putting aside the seemingly great 2023 remake), a huge variety of indie game devs, likely spurred on by childhood nostalgia, have happily rushed to fill the spritely turn-based military void. Amidst the Wargroove’s, Tiny Metal’s and Into the Breach’s of the world comes Warside, a hardy but underbaked experience whose core gameplay engine may be revving well, but is let down by the rest of the chassis.

Warside is a turn-based top-down pixel art tactics game from developer LAVABIRD and publisher First Break Labs. It bills itself as a ‘fast-paced’ tactics game that discourages defence over fast and fluid skirmishes. Its campaign follows a range of warring factions fighting for control of a super-weapon across various biomes and commanders. Currently, Warside also contains a map editor and multiplayer mode for local and online PvP – the developers have also promised that a skirmish mode and co-op campaign are also in the works, though that is not being factored into this review.

Despite being a long-time lover of turn-based tactics games (XCOM, my beloved), I haven’t played Advance Wars nor many of its contemporary continuations. This means that I came to Warside with a broad rather than specific appreciation for the genre, and from that perspective, I found its tactical core solid. While it’s not going to offer anything new or innovative, particularly to fans of this particular subgenre, I found myself settling into a familiar groove of countering the AI, skirmishing back and forth, determining unit combinations and overall moving through its core campaign at a satisfying pace.

While I can’t speak to how it compares to its inspirations, I found Warside’s claim of supporting fluid skirmishes over defensive lines to be fairly accurate. Its economy pushes you to progress forward and grapple over buildings, consider how you accumulate currency to buy more units, constantly think about reinforcements, and adapt to changing battle lines. While I inevitably prioritised some over others, each unit plays a key role on the battlefield that complements one another, and leads to a fairly diverse and dynamic army and combat. The best parts of Warside were juggling infantry, armour, air and sea conflicts all at once, with each battle overlapping and feeding into the larger war.

Regarding visual design, Warside wears its influence on its pixel chassis. It’s crisp and effective; each unit is visually distinct, environments are very readable, and the combat animations are satisfying (if a little long). There isn’t a huge variety to the maps – all the basic biomes are here and little else – but they at least change it up when it comes to terrain like roads, chokepoints, islands, coastlines and more in key missions. The UI is clean and unobtrusive too, and determining which units are yet to move and the current state of the battlefield was consistently easy and helped keep the pace flowing (though this becomes less true as the scale increases in later missions). The lack of an undo button for misclicks or mistakes is frustrating, though – it led to me restarting entire missions just to avoid the consequences of hitting the wrong square inadvertently.

Outside of the battlefield, though, Warside’s exterior begins to creak. The campaign’s design, outside of a few standout missions, is unremarkable and repetitive, often relying on too many objectives that boil down to ‘eliminate all enemies’ with little variety. Despite containing four colour-coded factions and a range of commanders, they rarely play differently enough from one another. Each faction contains only a single unique unit that barely varies tactics, and while each commander has a different unique power, they also aren’t likely to make you play that differently between missions.

Outside of the campaign, Warside also contains a multiplayer mode and map editor. The multiplayer mode allows for private and public matches, and the games lobby is a nice touch, but the choice of maps and commanders is strangely limited. The map editor, in contrast, is quite intuitive to use, and I could see myself spending some time putting together some unique designs if I could play them properly with friends or AI, but the lack of a basic skirmish mode for a quick tactical fix saps most of my motivation. It speaks to how oddly barebones the game is at launch – if it weren’t for the campaign being (mostly?) there, I would have assumed this was an Early Access release.

On a more positive note, though, it at least doesn’t have the technical difficulties that its sparseness might suggest. I played Warside on Steam Deck, and it did a great job recapturing a bit of that old handheld strategy game feel. While its first major update mentioned a range of game-breaking bugs and issues, I encountered none in my playthrough, leaving me with the impression that the game is either relatively polished now, or I was just lucky.