I’ll spare you the details of what happened to Glory Days 1, as we covered that little mystery in our earlier preview. Suffice to say, all naming whackiness aside, Glory Days 2 is a solid DS title, and one action aficionados should definitely look towards as a possibility to fill a smaller DS niche.
The gameplay is relatively simple to execute, but hard to explain. In a mixture of action and strategy, you’re some airborne military dude skirmishing against enemies, but also leading your own side. (Which is what all generals do, really.)
Basically, you fly back and forth on a 2D map in either a chopper or plane, bombing the crap out of stuff on the ground while guarding the skies. The whole point of each mission is to protect your base while leading your troops to take over the enemy side. To keep things interesting, you’re able to create and control troops and tanks, which will help clear the ground of troops and take over bases along the way. These bases are what will produce your men, and rather than gather resources, your army is funded through the money of citizens you rescue from the field of battle. (They either are so generous they reward you, work as indentured servants, or you harvest their organs – I’m not entirely sure, yet.)
The strategy elements are fairly simple to use, but at times you’ll be frustrated having to juggle a few tasks when all you want to do is carpet bomb someone. Even with only the action portions, though, there are some flaws.
Most notably, the task of shooting troops and tanks on the ground is rather frustrating. Due to the way the game controls, it’s very hard to angle your helicopter at the right angle to hit the ground troops. Often times you’ll risk hitting the ground, or sit there trying to adjust your nose’s angle so long that by the time you get it right, they’ve already moved on.
Even with the frustrating controls (at times), the too-near camera and the juggling of simple strategy elements with shoot ‘em up action, Glory Days 2 remains unreasonably fun. Like the arcade shooters of yore, there’s just something about the simplicity yet adrenaline pumping nature of it that makes you want to play more and more. Will it win any awards? Likely not. For DS owners sick of only puzzle, brain training or casual games coming out, though, it’s a nice reminder that Nintendo’s little handheld that could is very capable of other things Now to wait for other developers to remember this and step up to the plate as well…
