Wargroove is a turn-based RPG by Chucklefish, featuring vibrant design, a challenging campaign and perhaps the most important deep yet simple gameplay that unfurls before you as you venture deeper into the game. Largely hailed as the modern heir to GBA’s Advance Wars/cousin to Fire Emblem series, Wargroove starts with a mysterious assassination of the king of Cherrystone, followed by a war breaking out in the kingdom.
Young Queen Mercia is forced to flee to new lands in search of allies while being pursued by her undead foes controlled by a powerful necromancer named Valder. Inexperienced but eager, Mercia will learn from scratch how to command armies and take her opponents down in battles in true royal style. This is our Wargroove review for PC.
While generally saying I am not a fan of pixel art style, Wargroove possesses vibrant aesthetics that simply click together between the art style, gorgeous soundtrack, and fluid animations.
The events happening on the screen, be it a battle in some ruins or a cut-scene dedicated to the heroes discussing the next steps, everything feels in its place and one detail only compliments another.
While I have not played Advance Wars and my experience with Fire Emblem has not been too deep, being a turn-based RPG was enough to pick my initial interest in Wargroove. The tutorial, as most tutorials go, is super easy and can be beaten with your eyes closed but then the game slowly starts submerging you deeper into tactical gameplay and hammering in the importance of right positioning and countering as well as terrain/weather effects, general power levels, the health of the units corresponding with their attack and much more.
While your commanders are actively present on the battlefield, a unique twist is that the game allows you to continue to hire units as long as you have possession of barracks and sufficient coins to do so. That makes your armies somewhat more expendable, allowing for more aggressive gameplay.
My only real complaint about the combat would be aimed at the UI. The “wait” command that makes your unit skip their turn is placed directly next to the “attack” command. You can already see where this is going, right? Of course over the course of the game, I managed to skip countless turns with my fumble fingers. Was I actually going for the S-rank – something you would want to do to unlock special game content – it could have cost me a victory and had me waste 40-ish minutes or so.
In addition to about 30-hours long campaign featuring a sweet but largely predictable story, the game also allows players to create custom maps, cutscenes and even campaigns! Ever wanted to make your own little turn-based RPG but didn’t know where to start? Try out Wargroove’s own redactor.
There are also Arcade mode that pits you against 5 different opponents in quick succession, Puzzle mode that will test you with tricky challenges and just ONE turn to tackle them all and online play against other living opponents if you wish to test your mettle.
The game has also received a big free DLC called Wargroove: Double Trouble. It adds a new Outlaw faction with its own Outlaw Commanders, adds a new story campaign focusing around performing the biggest heist Aurania has ever seen and much more.
- Brand new Co-Op Story Campaign (can be played couch co-op, online co-op or even solo)
- 3 New Roguish Commanders
- 2 New Units – Thieves & Riflemen
- New Arcade missions
- Competitive online Quick Play maps
- Public and Private Multiplayer Lobbies
- Custom maps now playable online
- New Volcano map theme and more updates to the custom Editor tools
- Outlaw music tracks, composed by Phonetic Hero
In addition to the new content, the update reworked some of the old stuff. Developers made a balance pass and tweaked some things after testing with the Wargroove community. Check out the patch notes for the entire list of changes!
