Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is the twelfth installment of the "Nintendo Wars" turn based tactical war game series (going all the way back to 1988), the second installment to reach the DS, and the first that I've played. If the previous incarnations are anything like Days of Ruin, then I have been seriously missing out because it's one of the best DS games I've ever played.

Seriously. If you like turn based strategy games at all, stop reading this and go buy it.

The story of Days of Ruin is that meteors from space have completely decimated the planet. Civilization is in ruins (hence the title) and there's a serious Beyond Thunderdome vibe going on whenever the bad guys are talking. Then there's this plant virus thing. And there's some girl that I can't decide if she's a robot or secret agent for the government that's gone now or what. She doesn't know either, of course, because she's got amnesia, but it's selective. She does, as it happens, remember the latitude and longitude of the nearest automatic food factory.

What. Ever. The story in Days of Ruin is simultaneously over the top and melodramatic. But I don't care because as silly as it all is, at least it's engaging, and it's obviously not taking itself too seriously. You just need to put your disbelief on suspension for a while. Richter scale 12 and 13 earthquakes. Hah. Indeed.

What really does matter, since you'll be spending hours and hours looking at it, is the combat, and that is nothing short of brilliant. Then again, this being the 12 installment, it had better be. Your top screen is info, the touchscreen your battlefield. The interface is such that you can do pretty everything with either the stylus or the D-pad and buttons as you see fit.

The battlefield is layed out in little tiles: roads, grass, water, mountains, cities, factories and so on. Each tile can have a single unit placed on it, and can also have important effects on the unit occupying it. Mountains let infantry see farther, get in the way of tanks. Captured cities resupply and heal. Water gets in the way of land units. And so on. Capturing a city is a matter of sending an infantry unit to the city and selecting "capture" from the menu. Most cities have 20 "points". Each turn your infantry unit add its total HP to the city. When the total reaches 20, the city is captured. At this point, the city will resupply and heal units as well as provide you with much needed funds. You funds are used to buy units from whatever factories you control. A factory can produce one unit per turn which can be used on the next turn.

There are gobs and gobs of units, each with their relative strengths and weaknesses: infantry, mechanized infantry, bikes, jeeps, tanks, artillery, anti-air, missle trucks, helicopters, fighters, and various boats. Knowing how to use each is the key to winning a battle. If you had to rely on your memory for such info, this game would be a chore, but you don't. In addition to the info screen (up top) which will tell you a unit's vital stats (including fuel and ammo remaining) and effective opponent types, you can just poke around on the screen to find out how things will turn out. To see how well your mech unit will do against that tank, click on the mech, click on the tank, and look at the little number that pops up. That number tells you how well the your unit is going to do against the unit you're putting it up against. If you don't like the numbers, you can cancel everything, and look for better odds.

The difficulty curve on Days of Ruin ramps up pretty nicely and doesn't throw the whole system at you at once. As you move through the main story, more elements of battle are introduced. You'll get access to new units types, factories and cities. Additionally, you'll have access to a tactical session for each mission where one of the officers will give you a recommended course of action. On one occasion, I actually got tactical advice from the enemy. Like I said, the game is silly.

In addition to the single player campaign, you can engage in single player free battles against the CPU or in local or internet multiplayer games. There are tons of maps of various sizes and you can even create your own maps and trade them with people.

In the hours that I've played it so far, I have not encountered a single element worthy of complaint. Everything about Advance Wars: Days of Ruin is polished and well executed like you'd expect from company that's been making these games for 20 years. And after 20 years, they're not justing phoning it in: Days of Ruin is a great game.

Seriously. Go buy it.