War’s not meant to be a subject taken lightly, granted, but there has always been a rather curious charm to Intelligent System’s Advance Wars games. Whether it be the cute Tonka toy look of the units on the battlefield, the bright contrasting colours of each particular army or the baffling, over-the-top characters between whom the storyline plays itself out, there was always something rather bright and cheerful under all the conflict.

Dark Conflict is the follow-up to the excellent-but-rather-convoluted Dual Strike, a game so annoyingly addictive that it practically melted itself into my DS cartridge slot for about four months and refused to come out. Somewhat surprisingly, it ditches a lot of the more complicated faucets that its predecessor had and instead takes a trimmed-down, slightly back-to-basics approach that, whilst not harming the fun in any way, doesn’t do much to give the game a unique feel from older titles.

Not that there’s anything wrong with the older titles, obviously. As ever, Dark Conflict presents the player with a top-down, two-dimensional battlefield packed full of mountain ranges, woods and buildings. Each opposing side has a selection of ground, air and water-based units that each can move a set number of squares around the battlefield grid, engaging opposing units, capturing buildings and factories and scouting out enemy location.

As this is as good a time as any to introduce newcomers to all the fun, I’ll go right ahead. Think of Advance Wars as chess meets rock, paper, scissors, with yourself and then your opposition being given a turn to move all their pieces across the battlefield grid. Each of your units has a movement range and attack power, whilst each of them also proves to be more or less effective against certain types of enemy unit. The more you play and battle, the more you get used to which units can do what, and which really can’t.

The basic idea of Advance Wars is to either destroy all of your enemy units or capture their headquarters, either of which will bring the battle to an end. The main single player game – the Campaign mode – sees you battling across over 25 maps that vary in size and terrain, as well as what enemy units you come up against. The completion of each map will inch the story onward toward its conclusion, although it isn’t an easy task by any stretch of the imagination.

The great thing about Advance Wars game is that they are immediately accessible but under the hood really rather in-depth and tactical. PC-based RTS fans like Jay may be prone to scoff about this before going on to lecture you about the careful tactical balance required for a game of Warhammer: Dawn of War or Company of Heroes, but the turn-based nature of the handheld series throws up a heck of a lot of tactical avenues to explore. It might have cutesy rounded graphics and bright battlefield colours splashed everywhere, but strategy for simpletons this is not.

Having said that, Dark Conflict has stripped quite a few of those avenues away, preferring to focus itself more on the basic battlefield battling. Gone are the Commanding Officer powers that allowed you to store up power and then unleash a wave destruction or reparation depending on which character you were commanding as at the time. Gone too are the options to swap between two commanding officers during battle and the duel battle fronts that saw you fighting across two battlefields at the same time. It really depends on personal preference as to whether you consider this to be a good thing or not, but it certainly makes Dark Conflict feel like a more concentrated title.

It’s not all about what’s been cut out, of course, with a smattering of new units to play with. Capturing factories to build new battle units and taking cities to provide you with the finance to do so was always a rather slow, frustrating affair in previous titles, with the player having to move vulnerable on-foot units great distances. This has been cured somewhat with the introduction of motorcycle units, which have a greater range and attack than your standard infantry and give you a lot more options when it comes to gaining territory.

There are new options when it comes to defensive and scouting tactics too. You’re now offered a tank that can fire a flare across great distances, lighting a portion of the map and getting rid of the enemy-cloaking fog of war. If one of your units should bumble into an enemy under the cover of aforementioned fog they will lose their turn and become rather vulnerable to attack, hence this actually turns out to be one of the more useful additions to your armoury. Another hugely useful piece of kit is the anti-tank gun, which counteracts the new and highly-powered war tank, which is somewhat of a reworking of Dual Strike’s Neo Tank.

Reworking is actually a pretty appropriate word for Dark Conflict, as that is what it is. Rather than go for wholesale changes, Intelligent Systems have scraped away a few things, added a couple of others and presented a pretty familiar offering, and one that is still as fun as ever. It’s like slipping back into a comfortable pair of shoes, only to discover that they’ve got a slightly more sparkly colour and laces instead of being slip-ons.

Perhaps the biggest change the game has is its story and tone, which for some reason has been stripped of most of its cheery optimism and cheek and given a rather depressing, bleak nature. Previous Advance Wars titles weren’t exactly slapstick comedy, but Dark Conflict’s tale of the apocalypse, greed, mankind’s love of suffering and the search for a cure to a terrible illness makes previous instalments look like Charlie Chaplin classics. Worse still, the story is presented in the most clichéd, cheesy manner, making it very difficult to get yourself absorbed in proceedings. One thing’s for sure – this won’t be troubling the Phoenix Wrights of this world when it comes to storytelling.

Then again, it doesn’t need to. The campaign mode will take you a good while, partly due to it being 26 chapters long but also because at times it becomes brutally difficult. When it’s all done there’s all manner of fun to be had with some special one-off maps to test the higher end of your abilities, whilst the game also caters for single cartridge, wireless and online multiplayer fun, all packed in with a map creator to allow the more creative of you to sculpt your own theatres of war. As with the previous games in the series, this one could very easily last you months if not more, and against a like-minded chum it can provide some epic, long-lasting battles.

Thus, it’s hard to argue that the game warrants its price tag. It might have removed a great deal of its charm by going all serious on us, but the heart that beats beneath the sultry, serious exterior is still as good as ever. By stripping away a few of what were key game mechanics and introducing relatively little in the way of big changes it risked feeling a little stale, but as it turns out it is actually still highly enjoyable. It goes to show that a good thing need not change its skin at every opportunity to remain fun; that with careful changes and a bit of care a great gaming series can keep doing what it does best without the need for gimmicks. Next time, though, lay off the maudlin, eh folks?