Warside

I came to Warside wanting exactly one thing: a competent Advance Wars-style fight I could run on PC without hunting down a GBA emulator. On that narrow brief, it mostly delivers. The core loop of capturing buildings for income, buying units, and managing simultaneous land, air, and sea fronts all clicks the way it should. The economy actively pushes you forward rather than rewarding turtling, and that design choice keeps matches from devolving into the grinding stalemates that kill this genre. When you are juggling infantry pushes, tank lines, helicopter harassment, and a sub lurking in a coastal channel all at once, Warside genuinely earns its place at the table. The roster gives you real decisions to make. Fourteen commanders each carry a passive skill set and a charged Battle Power that can swing a mission if you time it right. Choosing between an aggressive commander like Blaze and a more control-oriented option is not cosmetic, it actually reshapes how your turn economy and unit priorities work. The 30-plus unit types cover the full spectrum: snipers, medics, mortar teams, saboteurs, tanks, artillery, submarines, warships, helicopters, and jet aircraft. Terrain matters too. Forest, desert, ice, and wasteland biomes each affect movement and visibility in ways that force you to adapt your formation mid-campaign rather than running the same build every mission. The complaints are real though, and worth naming before you hand over money. The campaign's story is thin, with single-portrait characters, flat dialogue, and a plot that gives you little reason to care who wins the war. More critically, the faction asymmetry is shallower than it looks on paper. Each side gets one unique unit, and that is not enough differentiation to make replaying missions with a different faction feel meaningfully different. The campaign also leans too hard on eliminate-all-enemies objectives when the mission design is at its least inspired. There is no undo button for misclicked moves, which means a single slip on a 25-minute mission can send you back to the start. Community feedback post-launch flagged the same issue, and it remains a friction point. Steam reviews settled at a mixed rating around 68 percent, which is an accurate calibration of a game with a solid engine and undercooked trimmings. The multiplayer side is where patient players might find the longer-term value. Local and online PvP are both present, cross-platform play is supported, and the built-in map editor means the community can keep generating content even if the dev roadmap takes time. Post-launch patches have been active, with balance adjustments targeting infantry underuse and tank overreliance, which signals that LAVABIRD is actually reading the numbers. A skirmish mode and co-op campaign were promised in the roadmap, and if those land in reasonable shape, the value proposition improves significantly. Right now, though, you are buying a foundation, not a finished structure.

Fred · Scout Team

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