Comparisons towards Fire Emblem and Advance Wars will be made, because Valkyria Chronicles seems to be a mixture of them and more. It's distinguished enough from them to stand on it's own, and here's why.
It is turn based strategy combined with real time action in the form of a third person shooter. Before going on missions, you can recuit new units, upgrade weapons, train your troops by XP's and read up onto summaries of chapters or profiles of people.
During the turn based strategy part, Welkin can issue special orders in order to boost up his squad. Calling for backup is possible if the roster allows it, and there are 5 main class units to be found next to the tanks.
Scouts are the best class for their high movement, the grenade launcher and even effective firepower. Troopers carry machine guns suitable for any situation except against tanks. Lancers carry anti-armor weapons but their accuracy is lower than others.
Engineers can repair tanks, refuel ammo's and disarm land mines, essential for almost every mission. And Snipers are able to take out units from far away, also very effective at times. Once you select a unit, it goes over into real time action mode.
Eliminating the grid structure found in many strategy games, you are free to move around then and attack once, but you are also able to rescue fallen allies, crouch into a defending position or retreat using occupied camps around the maps. Walking around enemy territory creates risks in the form of enemy fire, but if you are able to team up with others, you could initiate support fire from them.
The recruitable characters have their differences with the potential abilities they represent, but since their backgrounds are stored away in the Personel tab, they felt absent from the progressing storyline. They aren't the same as generic soldier units from any TBS or RTS.
The overall gameplay feels too slowpaced for me to be genuinely excited by it. There are unneccesary animations playing that pushed me away from enjoying it further. Certain transitions, either from scenes or perspectives are the same deal.
People reloading their guns after a phase, Leon's face every time you upgrade something at the R&D facility, the medic scene constantly playing, come on! Admit it that you too got tired of these and several other moments!
The novelty of the gameplay weared off as the final chapters appeared; the climax wasn't spectacular. What began as an interesting new way of designing a turn based strategy game slowly started turning into a series of missions I just wanted to get over with soon enough.
The rush was certainly missing, and the flow perished away. Disliking the way units reinforce or retreat the areas, I felt that it wasn't enough to be considered as "building" or "evacuating" them. Especially how recruits who fell in battle could easily be revived felt cheap to me.
Valkyria Chronicles has a twist design on traditional strategy videogames, but needs to be fleshened out in order for me to get really excited. Also, speed the whole process up and lessen the loading scenes! Book Mode was just a disguise in the form of them.
Rating: 7.2
No comments:
Post a Comment