2001’s Advance Wars is a perfect little game: Compact yet tactically rich, a purposefully limited but versatile library of units like top-heavy tanks and chonky bombers smashing together in rock-paper-scissors shoot-outs. The only wildcard, each commanding officer’s slow-charging heroic power, can swing the tide of a battle but is still relatively tame—like gaining a couple extra tiles of range on artillery strikes for one pivotal turn. Give a small team of brilliant game designers the remit to make chess with toy soldiers, and I think this is what they would come up with. And yet it is not my favorite Advance Wars.
My favorite, Advance Wars: Dual Strike for the Nintendo DS, is more the Chess 2 of strategy games. More units, more powers, combining those wildcard bursts in ways that drag matches out into dizzying swingy battles like games of Risk where someone’s turning in their bonus cards every freaking turn. Forget perfect: I loved the bombast of Dual Strike being messily over-the-top, and on a visit to indie studio Area 35’s Tokyo office ahead of TGS this week I immediately clocked that its new entry in the Tiny Metal series takes after my one true love.
Six years after Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble, the confusingly named Tiny Metal 2 puts you in control of two factions at once so you can combine their strengths. Even better, you can now do it in co-op, with one player taking command of each team.
The more immediately obvious upgrade in Tiny Metal 2 if you’re not the specific type of weirdo still carrying a torch for Dual Strike 20 years later is that it looks much, much nicer than the first couple games, which traded out Advance Wars’ charming 2D style for a swag-less low poly 3D. Tiny Metal 2 is less Unity asset store and more comic booky. It’s missing the polished sheen of a 2025 Nintendo game, but stylish enough to make a nice first impression.
Tactically it feels like there’s a bit more going on here too. The fundamentals borrowed wholesale from Advance Wars are all still here: you capture buildings with infantry to earn resources and manufacture new troops; tanks can brush off machine gun fire but are susceptible to a heavy blast of artillery; submarines are death for other ships though easy to sink once they break the surface. But a focus fire mechanic makes the order of your orders matter much more.
At first I merrily threw my troops into the fray one at a time, each attack on an enemy earning them a bit of damaging retaliatory fire. Then I realized I could give a couple weaker units a command to focus on an enemy and wait for a combined strike, so that when I rolled in with a heavy mech to trigger the team-up attack the enemy would be toast before it could hit back.
Tiny Metal 2 also lets you choose what direction units are facing and makes attacks from the sides or rear potentially more effective, though the extra step this adds to controlling each unit—and the number of possible attacks you have to try on an enemy to find the optimal one—is maybe more fiddly than this kind of light strategy game really benefits from. The UI is already working hard to convey strengths and weaknesses for each unit against other types, but some sort of visual front/back/side armor rating would cut out some of the tedium of fretting over each and every move.
The much nicer art and the promise of co-op team-ups that lean into melding the commander powers of each are more appealing to me than those niggles are concerning, though. Even with Nintendo recently returning to the Advance War series for the first time in decades in the form of a cute but quite limited remake, this remains an oddly rare form of snackable strategy game. Tiny Metal 2 seems to have enough ideas of its own to finally help propel it out of “We have Advance Wars at home” territory.
It’s on Steam now, and out sometime next year.
