Great controls, addictive gameplay, and stellar online if you can get passed being talked down to like a four year old.
Lets focus on the good here for a second. The good here is the overall control scheme for Battalion Wars 2 is surprsingly in depth, albiet unintuitive. Granted, the controls remain SIMPLE, but they fundamentally revolve around the D-Pad to select units, and then pressing A in or not in conjunction with Z or other selected options on the D-Pad to issue various different orders. As you can imagine, in the heat of battle it is incredibly easy to get confused and Press A while you've locked on to an enemy -- with your tanks selected ... for instance, which might send your tanks barreling towards enemy bazooka units when all the while you were actually wanting to simply press A once WITHOUT any enemy unit targeted so you actually tell your tanks to wait back and OUT OF THE BAZOOKA UNITS WAY! I cannot stress enough how incredibly easy it is to actually cause the exact scenario you wanted to prevent, to happen, by simply holding one extra button (because you're shooting), or having your selection stuck on a different unit without realizing it. Incredibly annoying.
That being said, if you told me years earlier that someone was going to make a third person shooter war game that allowed you to give individual commands to dozens of troops while simultaneously fighting in the battle yourself, with the WII REMOTE of all things ... I would have laughed in your face. Ergo, for the absolutely bizarre and ambitious gameplay style the developers were going for, they hit upon quite possibly the best way to go about it -- its simply extremely prone to user-interface-error.
That, however, is not really the bad part about Battalion Wars. The bad part is that this sort of gameplay and control system was simply not meant for children. And this is fine. But when the story IS meant for children, you suddenly feel extremely .... extremely ... extremely annoyed. Imagine Halo with Bugs Bunny and the Loony Toons. Exactly.
The most obvious transgression against your intellect you'll find is how each nation is based off a REAL nation, and quite blatantly ... but NOT for humors sake. The game treats each faction as if its dead serious about the stupidity of ... say ... the "Anglo Isles" as they're run by bumbling generals who shout cheerio left and right ... or Tundra, who are blatantly Russians ... who are ready and willing to go to war with practically anyone just to prove to the other countries around them that they don't have a small ... you know. Its so rediculous that often times you'll watch a cutscene and are simply waiting for someone to jump out of the shadows and say "Can you believe this guy? What an idiot!" to simply confirm that the game isn't taking itself seriously. But instead, nothing happens -- these cheesy, horrible, and darn near insulting displays of stupidity simply keep piling on at a steady flow, as if either dead serious about the stupid subject matter ... or either expecting you to think the stupid you see before you is funny. Which it isn't. Not without a punchline. Not when you're actually trying to ENJOY something.
And some of these country knock offs approach racism in a way ... its extremely painful to listen to Admiral A-Quera when his voice actor is clearly American, but seems to think that a nasaly version of Crusty the Clown off the Simpsons is a surefire way to fake an Asian accent. WRONG.
And although its not uncommon to complain about voice acting in a game, I do have to say this is the first time I've ever had to actually complain about having TOO MUCH voice acting in a game. When each level has a narrarator that has to read out EVERY SINGLE WORD ON THE SCREEN before a level, just to tell you what you'll find out anyway once you watch the cheesy and agonizingly long cinematics at the beginning of each level ... you begin to get information overload. Its bad enough that the game's objectives and story are designed to appear as kid friendly as a stranger with candy ... but when they start telling you the same stuff OVER and OVER again, you begin to feel compelled to just turn off all the audio in the game else your brain go numb. Its quite possible I've lost a few brain cells while playing this title -- is it possible that if people talk to your like your stupid, you become stupid in the process? The headache I have is telling me so.
Probably more insulting than this whole story of the game is how much the sheer cruelty of war is played down. Granted, BWii was never meant to be a title with a lot of realism, but not even games like Halo ... which are obviously not real ... take the battles occuring lightly. Its always serious business -- yet in Battalion Wars 2, the commanding officers treat each encounter with all the seriousness of a war with ... nerf guns; shouting selfish things like "How dare he take MY base! Repel the honorless invaders!" ... and how your defeated enemy commander can call back to you "Fine, you may have your little island, but we'll see you on the beach!" as if initiating playful banter. What about all the people who died in the battle? What about the lives your trying to save by going after this proposed "superweapon" ? The game falls flat on its face in a pile of stupid.
Fundamentally where Battalion Wars 2 goes wrong is its remarkable ability to take things that should be funny seriously, and things that should be serious with a grain of salt ... nay ... often times silly and completely out of context.
And for that reason, BWii's saving grace is its unique gameplay and perhaps the most fleshed out online mode of any Wii game to date. That is, if you can sit through it without losing so many brain cells that a soap bar can out smart you.