Battalion Wars II seems have the ability to be a fun game. The graphics are fun, the cut scenes are well done and not overused (after getting through the tutorial missions), and the game concept is awesome. You are the leader of a battalion (obviously used in the "autonomous operations" sense, not the "500-1500 soldiers" sense), taking your squad into action time and again to defend your glorious empire. I sat down at this game with high expectations of fun. Again, the ability is there... but the execution isn't all it's cracked up to be.

First a rundown of the good: the game doesn't take itself seriously. The main characters are over-the-top. Not quite camp, but are the cartoon villains of old. "I have defeated your defenders! Now I can come in completely by surprise from the east!" And the first basic missions are fun. Even the voice acting isn't too bad, if overdone.

However, the tutorials tend to be a bit annoying. While they give you the important details, for the first three or four missions the designers are constantly stopping your flow of gameplay with cutscenes of approaching soldiers or tanks, and descriptions of what they do. This does serve a useful purpose of briefing you, but that could have been better done with a small Heads Up Display and voice acting without requiring a full game stop and video play.

Once missions get more complex, however, and you need to divide your "battalion" into multiple working groups and send separate commands to each, you quickly discover the game's shortfall: the designers have attempted to cram too many features into too few buttons. The A button has different functions depending on what the wiimote cursor is currently hovering over... or if the cursor is hovering over anything at all! The current "function" of the A button is displayed on your HUD, but the display is on the right hand side of the screen, requiring you to look away from the action to see the current function. Selecting units using the left and right D pad seem useful at first, but cycling through 5 different unit types while also trying to send commands can be difficult. And half the time I seemed to end up telling the wrong units to "stand down", usually in a bad place, like right in front of an enemy tank. In a game where you're supposed to be planning on-the-field action, I felt like I was constantly struggling against the controls, instead of using them.

Overall the game was fun, but I struggled with the controls so badly that I ended up being more annoyed than entertained. I discovered that I did a better job playing by just sending "All" my units at each individual target, and just wildly pressing the A button until I got the function I wanted. And I felt like I was constantly having to micromanage the camera, an annoyance in a game where you also have to micromanage everything else. There are enough games out there that AREN'T annoying that I've abandoned Batallion Wars II. If you don't like micromanagement, or if you don't have steady enough hands to perfectly target a small unit on the screen at 4 paces and click A (remember, A is only significant if you are hovering a unit, and while locking can help, I always seemed to lock the wrong guy), you'd be better off playing something else.

I know I am.