Athena Crisis

Written by Elliot Hilderbrand on 9/23/2024 for PC  

I recall in the fall of 2001, I was sitting in my parents' mini-van, driving out to my grandparents' house for Thanksgiving in the next state over. I was sitting in the back with both of my brothers. I was almost 15, my one brother 12, the other 7. I had just picked up a game a month earlier called Advance Wars for the Game Boy Advance. The best feature that Advance Wars had was the pass-and-play mode. You could chose a map to fight on, select your team, and face off against other people in the same room, and you only needed one Game Boy to make that happen. We would spend hours in the car, passing the Game Boy back and forth between the three of us, fighting these little pixilated wars against each other. I, the owner of the game, always won. It was nothing really. The key was to take out the brother who was closest in age to me, the smart one, before finishing off my much younger brother, who never stood a chance to begin with. My brothers quickly caught on to my schemes and began to gang up on little old me, forcing me to play smarter.

As we aged, we still kept bringing the game and Game Boy on every car trip, playing the entire time. On airplanes, we would sit in separate rows, but still pass the Game Boy back and forth. This is one of my favorite gaming memories I have with both of my brothers. When a remake of the first two Advance Wars titles came out on Switch I jumped at the opportunity to share these fantastic games with new friends and family. I brought them to the last Thanksgiving, and once again, we had a blast; all of us a little smarter than we were in our youth, and twenty years older.

I try not to talk about other games when reviewing another one, but, not mentioning that Athena Crisis is, at least visually, a spiritual successor to Advance Wars does it an injustice. I knew what I was getting myself into when I took this game for review. Hell, I took it because this looked like a fancy clone of the 2001 title I enjoyed so much. There have been a few others along the way; Wargroove is another example of a similar style but with a more fantasy and talking dog bend to the formula.

Athena Crisis is a pixelated turn-based strategy game. The board is filled with units, places for you to encounter, and buildings to take over or derstroy. A lot of times, you win by defeating the opposite teams, or capturing all their bases. Several other factors can play into a scenario, too, but more often than not, just beating the other team wins. I like to think of it a lot like super chess. You have a set of units you control, the opposition does as well, and you take turns moving them unit by unit until you meet the goal set at the beginning of the fight. You have the same stats as the opposing team’s units. It’s about how you move them, where you move them, and how you capture and destroy the opposing team that makes the difference. The game plays out in a way that if you have played Advance Wars or Wargroove you will be instantly familiar with.

In a lot of ways, Athena Crisis is more than just a spiritual sucessor to a game from the early 2000s. It’s a shame a great game that has this much care put into it is easily brushed aside for the vague saying of, it’s just like Advance Wars. There is more of the same, but also much more. There is of course, the official campaign; that comes with 36 official maps. But that isn’t all. There are 10 more prequel campaign maps in the local campaign folder, and already handful of community campaigns, and I can only assume there will be more to come. Each one has a bit of a description to help you choose the right campaign for you, a difficulty tracker to show how hard it is to play through, and how many maps are part of that specific campaign. A lot of choices in how to play the game, and that comes without even touching the online multiplier portion of Athena Crisis.

There are also a lot of smaller, quality of life choices that I can make with Athena Crisis that put this above a simple spiritual sucessor. For instance, you can keep the default names of all the hero units in Athen Crisis. Or, you can change them to anything you like. This reminds me of my childhood titles that let me change the name of people like my rival. I often found myself naming them after a friend, or brother - someone I didn’t want to lose to. The heroes all have some small portrait animations as well. You can change their default colors too. There are other features, like linking your Discord profile to the game, or even in-game changes, like selecting how fast you want the flow of battle to be. These are all items that I don’t care too much about personally. But, for someone who likes to control or change every aspect that is available to them, Athena Crisis allows for that.

Athena Crisis is more than just a video game, it also comes with a campaign manager. You can create your own maps, your own storylines, and then share them with others. That was something that you could do in Advance Wars but found myself limited to having only my brothers and one other friend that I could enjoy playing maps I created with. Athena Crisis allows you to play with anyone else. The ideas for maps that I want to see pop up are endless. Maybe real life skimishes? Or someone making some type of fanfiction, or even a unique campaign they themselves have some up with. With the tools to create what you can imagine I hope Athena Crisis can grow some feet and some really creative people can have some fun with the editor.

My biggest gripe with Athena Crisis has to do with all the options available, and the lack of explanation for how to use them. I figured starting out with the campaign was the right choice, and I still agree with that. But the further in I got the moe exploring I wanted to try, to see what I could really do with Athena Crisis. I decided I wanted to try my hand at the map creation tool. I found alot of options at my disposal. I really could create a map of whatever situation I wanted. Place whatever buildings or units I wanted in any locations—some items where harder to learn than others. I could create the maps I wanted to, but I found that it took some time to understand how to increase the map size. Fiddling around with the map maker showed me enough what I needed to know, but it was not the most intuitive piece of the game. Small issues to say the least, but, I can see how some might give this section of the game a try and come out disappointed in the end.

My other big gripe was the level of learning that needed to take place to be good at the game. There are nine tutorial or lessons you can take to help learn Athena Crisis better. Boot camp, unit abilities, repairs, objective, building, are just some of the basics that are covered. I also found that just because it is covered does not me it was useful. Many of the lessons become boring quickly, with a lot of dialogue that doesn’t help teach you much, but more often than not I found them to be necessary to understand ther overall game better. If you don’t go through the lessons you find that you need to either spend more time reading what each unit does before building one. It is hard to convince someone to take all those lessons before playing the meat and potatoes of the game.

This is not a one-time knockoff of a game you enjoyed in your youth. Athena Crisis sets the standard for turn-based strategy titles moving forward. On the outside looking in, there doesn’t seem to be much to Athena Crisis; so much so that just by looking at it the game it feels like a knockoff of a more popular, well known franchise. But that would be judging a book by its cover. The large amount of units you have to play with are great. Sure, Athena Crisis takes a little time to understand all the rules, but some games need you to do a little homework before you get to watch the movie. Do the homework, and when you’ve had your fill give the campaign editor a go, you could spend hours crafting your own adventure storyline for others to play.