Battalion Wars is a lot like Advance Wars, the series of strategy titles for the Game Boy and Nintendo DS. It is cheerful and brightly-lit. Its commanding officers are full of wisecracking bluster and bear very few battle scars. Soldiers are cute and stumpy-looking. Each army wears a carefully colour-coordinated wardrobe. When an infantry grunt dies in a shower of bullets, and a little colour-coded ghostly skull floats up out of his body, that skull very nearly looks as if it is smiling at you. War is heck, basically.

The game is set at the end of the 21st century, presumably because that sounds futuristic, but there are no rayguns or teleporters or anything outlandishly high-tech. It is clearly not our time, though. The world features a different set of continents from the one we know, but all the same accents. Russians and Germans and Americans aren't called Russians and Germans and Americans here, but you will not be surprised to learn that the leader of the country called "Tundra" is a Tsar.

As the action begins, we are doing a little training along the demilitarized zone between the Western Frontier (read: America) and Tundra. We learn to move a stumpy little infantryman around, and we learn how to aim his gun and how to fire it. It feels very much like a traditional third-person shooting game, except that all the colours are brighter and the edges are softer. We go exploring, hoping maybe to shoot at a few targets. Instead, we spot a Tundran spy and the electronic eavesdropping posts he has set up in the woods. An invasion is imminent. Ack!

At this point the view broadens a bit, and a few more foot soldiers join us on the ground. We learn that the original infantryman we started with wasn't really us; he was just the one we were controlling at the time. We learn how to get the other soldiers to follow us, and we learn how to order them to hold their ground and defend their territory against attack. We learn how to get them all shooting at the same thing.

It only takes a few minutes, this introductory campaign, but it's enough. The shooting parts are marvelous fun, with the bullets leaving glowing trails in the air, and little ghostly happy-skulls floating up everywhere over the battlefield. It feels good to fire these guns. But it's on the management side that the game really shines. We can zoom the camera out to an overhead view, and when we do we start to see the ground for what it is: a big sloppy (albeit colourful) chessboard. We send some bazooka units over there to fight some tanks, and we drive a tank or two over here to shoot at a helicopter, and then we check back and check back and check back, making sure nobody's getting too short on men or firepower. If we can keep all the balls in the air, the green forces of the Western Frontier will win the battle. If we can't, the Reds of Tundra will prevail.

Later, when we meet the thuggish Xylvanians (read: Germans), who all wear blue, Tundra and the Western Frontier realize that a new arrangement might be a smart idea. This makes managing it all even more complex and even more fun, although never so much fun that it's not occasionally still a good idea to step down into the action and squeeze off a few rounds ourselves.

For all the cartoony graphics and all the bright colours, the game at the heart of it all is a good bit tougher and more concertedly warlike than any of the entries in the Advance Wars series. Many soldiers, both enemy grunts and our own boys, die in each round. Even so, the thing is not Brothers in Arms. After each round, we get a score out of 100 and a corresponding letter grade. The prize looks for all the world like a ribbon a really good pie would win at the county fair.