Mobile Battles takes mobile spin on Advance Wars

Advance Wars is great. Nintendo's turn-based battle series has given us great joy down the years, and we're eagerly anticipating this Friday's release of the latest DS version, Advance Wars: Dark Conflict.

And it seems mobile game developers share our love of the series. Glu's two Ancient Empires games were directly influenced by Nintendo's strategy series, and they've now been followed by Punch Entertainment's Mobile Battles: Reign of Swords.

However, this one's got online features. You start by playing through a campaign mode, unlocking new military units as you build up an army customised to your strategic tastes. Once you've done that, it's time to go online and play other people.

It sounds like Punch has put plenty of thought into the multiplayer aspects, given the fact that few mobile gamers will be online long enough to play a full session of this kind of strategy game.

So, instead of real-time battles, you set up your army units, give them tactical orders, and send them off to battle alone. The best players get bonus units each week to keep them interested.

It sounds intriguing, and there's a beta of the PC version here to give you a sense of how the mobile game plays, in advance of its February release in the US. Punch is looking for European distribution too, so fingers crossed for that.