What’s Good About…Wargroove
Do you need a new tactics game, but are like me and both miss Advance Wars and aren’t down with the direction that Fire Emblem has gone the last few years? One, get out of my head. And second, those are very specific requirements, random person that’s currently reading this; but I have you covered. It’s this little game called Wargroove (you have no idea how mentally close this name is to Warframe to me and I barely play that game).
Wargroove is a turn-based strategy game by Chucklefish, the respective developer and publisher of indie darlings Starbound and Stardew Valley, two games that I’ve been thinking about getting into fully for the longest time now. But you aren’t here to read about me verbalize my thought process for picking what games to play for my spare time, you came here to read about what I liked about Wargroove, and I can tell you that it’s quite a bit.
The game’s story is pretty standard but entertaining. It follows Mercia, the recently crowned queen of the nation of Cherrystone after her father was assassinated by some asshole vampire lady on behalf of the Felheim Legion. With a name like that, you would think it would be a group of nice people who like cute stuff, but Nah. They’re a literal undead horde headed up by this necromancer named Valder and his pet zombie lady general Ragna. So now you gotta go to the different kingdoms and petition for aid with the help of Emeric, her father’s longtime advisor/court mage/friend and war dog/pet Caesar, who is a good boy that I will die for him if need be.
A lot of this comes down to the units you get and the amount of money each turn to purchase them. At the start of each turn, you get around a couple of hundred gold based on how many barracks or other unit-type buildings you have captured on the field. These range from standard infantry soldiers and spearmen to some of the weirder stuff like dogs as scouting units (who don’t actually die in combat, they just run away, a nice touch), fish people as amphibious infantry units, dragons as heavy bombers (metal as fuck) and giants both natural and artificial as siege units. I think it’s needless to say that the concepts for units in this game are ridiculous and extra in the best way.
But to loop back to what I was saying about income and units, some of these are kind of unnecessary in the early game when you have the basic Spearman units that do critical hit damage to enemies when stacked next to each other and are super effective against most land units and are dirt cheap to pay for, so why use anything else when fighting stuff?
Small gripe about balance aside, the game does do its best to keep things fair, and a lot of that goes to giving the named characters in the story roles as commanders in the field that can be controlled as hero units. These characters also have access to super-powerful abilities called Grooves that fill up over time and can be used to support your armies; some of these are Mecia’s group heal, Valder’s Raise Dead (free infantry unit that can immediately act), Emeric’s Elder Shield (an Area of Effect defense buff) and more from. If you’re wondering if these sound similar to the CO Powers from Advance Wars, then congratulations you guessed right. A lot of these go a long way to adding new dimensions to combat and tactics and aren’t so powerful that they end up breaking the flow of the match. Especially important in multiplayer, which is rad and also cross-platform, which is also rad unless you got it on PS4 because Sony is being Sony about Cross-Platform play.
Regardless of any of that, or slight balance issues, I’d still heartily recommend Wargroove. It’s a great turn-based tactics game that wears both its influence and its heart on its sleeves. Plus it’s like USD 20 or your regional equivalent and it’s also currently on Xbox Game Pass at the time of writing, so you have no excuse. Give Wargroove a Chance. Play Wargroove.
