Tiny Metal

Genre: Turn-Based Strategy

Players: 1-2 Competitive (Online)

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Review:

Tiny Metal is a Turn-Based Strategy game that very clearly seeks to be this generation’s equivalent to the Advance Wars series, with grid-based gameplay, cutesy color-coded versions of modern military units, and an overall presentation that seems exactly in line with what you would have expected Nintendo to produce with the Advance Wars series, if they hadn’t all but abandoned it.

What this means is that this game offers a solid foundation of strategy for fans of the genre, making players consider the strengths and weaknesses of different unit types while managing their resources in battle. However, Tiny Metal brings a few of its own ideas into the fray as well, such as a “lock on” attack that allows you to combine multiple attacks into one, and an “assault” attack that allows you to drive enemies back, at the cost of initiative.

I should warn players that they will want to tool around with the options when they first start the game. By default, the game sets called “Dialogue Auto Next” to “On”, which means that the game’s dialogue, including tutorial information, will disappear off the screen to be replaced by the next line of text before you can read it. Also, while it’s nice to have little animations showing the battle unfolding, they can get a bit long-winded, and players might quickly find the desire to change the settings to shorten them.

Graphically, this game looks pretty good, with a toylike 3D aesthetic that makes the battles seem like they’re playing out on a model battlefield, which seems ideal for something like Advance Wars. There are also little touches like the zoomed-in view depicting the battles keeping in mind where units are in relation to one another and the way the terrain is laid out. Nothing super-impressive, but it works very, very well for this type of game.

One place where this game falls short in comparison to Advance Wars is in its options. This game doesn’t have the naval units that were in Advance Wars, its multiplayer (added in a post-launch update) only supports 2 players and only online, and the game doesn’t have any sort of map creator or anything like that. This stands in stark contrast not only to Advance Wars, but to 2019’s Wargroove, which boasted a feature list that not only matched what Advance Wars brought to the table, but actually outclassed them in multiple ways.

I know that a comparison to other games isn’t necessarily fair in a game review, as the question should simply be whether a game can stand alone on its own merits, and please understand that Tiny Metal absolutely does – as a look at what the Advance Wars series could have become, Tiny Metal stands tall as a superb strategy game deserving of a spot in genre fans’ collections. However, this game wasn’t released in a vacuum, and it was so clearly inspired by Advance Wars that it invites comparison, and while it’s still a strong game compared to those titles, the lack of features is a bit disappointing.

tl;dr – Tiny Metal is a Turn-Based Strategy game that attempts to show us what the Advance Wars series would look like if it was done using more modern graphics, and it succeeds brilliantly. It’s just a shame that it’s a bit feature-poor in comparison to the legacy it’s taking after. Also, be sure to mess with the settings before you start, as the default settings can cause issues.

Grade: A-

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