Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble Review

Back on the Gameboy Advance, one game I could never put down was the Advance Wars series, it was a family friendly turn based strategy game from Nintendo that had you building troops, capturing towns and getting into Risk-like troop battles. Sadly the series went away after Nintendo found success with the Fire Emblem series but fans have been longing for a new entry.

In comes Indie Developer Area 35, who pretty much said “if Nintendo isn’t going to do it, then we will” and released Tiny Metal last year on PC and Nintendo Switch. While I never got the chance to play the original at launch, the game was stated to have some issues which were patched out. The sequel and the subject to our review today – Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble – jumps in immediately with these updates and delivers a more definitive version of the game while continuing where it left off.

Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble takes place after the events of the first game but are apparently not needed to follow the new events. The game takes place in a modern yet fictional world at war with a variety of warring factions are battling for control of their territories and the Mercenaries that help fight their wars. While the campaign goes to dark places despite the game’s cute design, I found it hard to care for the characters or the events that was occurring which made me want to jump into the battles directly.

It helps that the gameplay itself is so addicting for a Strategy title. Players a thrown into a map with several units, usually low-tier soldiers and some heavy weapons, and are tasked with missions from defeating the enemy soldiers, to capturing a specific location. Each unit has their own rules for moving around the map, as well as how strong they are against other units.

For example – your basic infantry unit is great for taking on human opponents but suck against machines like a APC or Tanks, but they can also walk on mountain tiles for a defense bonus where tanks cannot. If you’d played the mentioned Advance Wars, this is a basic factor to how the game generally works, what makes Tiny Metal different is that there is more options on how to defend and attack.

On the attack side we have the ability to target units for a group attack, allowing you to combine the might of how many units you can into one, dealing a massive amount of damage in the process. The other is to Assault your opponent, which gives a bit of extra strength to attack but will knock the defending unit back if they take too much damage in the attack, great for when you need to prevent them from taking over a factory or priority station.

There is also an additional level of strategy in Full Metal Rumble that wasn’t part of the original as Area 35 updated the game to watch for Ammo and Fuel. Both can be replenished at owned factories, airports or by APCs, but it can be the difference between life and death as you it can stop you from both attacking and defending from attacks and prevent vehicles from moving.

There is something to say about the game’s difficulty curve though, which it ramps up fast after the game’s tutorial. During my time with the campaign, it wasn’t unusual for a match to take upwards to 20 turns to beat even on early levels, a frustrating thing as the game does give you extra challenges to beat the scenario in under a set amount of turns, or complete it with out building more troops.

The game also has a multiplayer mode out of the gate, something that was missing from the last Tiny Metal, and a series of extra challenges/scenarios to test your skills and try out some strategies in a variety of situations. I found I had more fun with these modes as it was less stakes in failure and the challenges were less frustrating.

Tiny Metal: Full Metal Rumble may not need the previous game to enjoy it, but given its difficulty spike and how the game plays out, it may be beneficial to have a little knowledge in some tactics before jumping in to the sequel. Still if you’re looking to satisfy that turn-based military itch that Advance Wars would scratch, you owe it to yourself to take a look at the series.