The game’s title art
Warside is a game you can easily guess what it is going for. It wants to be a sort of new Advance Wars game, and that’s fine on its own. Sure. Go make your own new Advance Wars.
As an Advance Wars game it seems fine. There’s a few mechanics at play here that are slightly different, mostly in terms of what units can do and what type of units exist and how you capture cities. There’s ranged infantry snipers as well as bulldozers that push other units (and you can drown units this way). There’s some originality that feels like it expands on Advance Wars organically. That’s great.
It really apes the Wargroove style
What irks me about it is that it seems to want to heavily copy the look and feel of another Advance Wars-like (though it had much more differences), Wargroove. If you haven’t heard of Wargroove, it, uh, well it looks like this game but medieval. It’s another Advance Wars-like game. Fairly popular, they made two of them so far. But this game seems to basically lift the UI, UI animations and generally art style of Wargroove. It feels like this is a Wargroove mod instead of its own thing given how familiar it looks.
It really, really wants to look like Wargroove
That aside, the demo has a bunch of placeholders and really bland atmosphere. Apart from that, the game is neat. There’s potential here but it feels dangerously close to plagiarism or theft on some level. It is not made by the Wargroove devs, but maybe there’s an angle here I’m not aware of?
As of writing (2024-10-20), Warside is still only available as a demo.