I have lots of mixed feelings about this one. Going in, the setting seems refreshing, and I was expecting a somewhat grounded tactical strategy, similar to XCOM, but with some real-time elements. Well, turns out, this is only grounded by anime standards - you still get some really annoying anime and JRPG-ish tropes in game design and in plot. On the good side, it still avoided some of the most common pitfalls (At least we're not in school and all the main characters are older than 15).
1 - I somewhat expected, but still was disappointed when the fantastical elements appeared. I can live with existence of a magical rock that can work as ammo, armor, healing potion, gasoline - but the "Valkyria" part of the title got me rolling my eyes more than once, let's say.
2 - Maybe it's a "me" problem, but the strategy part heavily incentivizes you to adopt one strategy that works on at least 70% of missions: you spam 4-5 orders on your scouts, and rush into enemy frontlines, ignoring 90% of damage, and kill your target in one to two hits because you can destroy a tank with a regular rifle in one shot now I guess. You can certainly play in other ways, but I don't think it's possible to get A rank without doing this. And the game punishes you for not doing this, not giving you as much rewards for playing "badly" (which in 100% of cases means "slowly", no other metrics that matter).
3 - Real-time part of gameplay also works a bit strange: enemy units fire at you when they see you, but not every unit (that I can understand), and only when you are not aiming (this I can not). This motivates you to cheese this mechanic a ton, and at the very least spam the "end turn" button to avoid getting hit/spam "aim" if you see your unit may be in range when turn starts. This together with previous point makes me constantly feel like I have to cheat the game in order to play well, instead of playing how I imagine it should have worked.
3.5 - Using covers also seems like a cheat often - if you are ducked (and you can only do this in a specific location), you always receive less damage, even if you sit on the wrong side of the barricade, to the point where it's useless to shoot anyone who is ducked, however good of a view you get of them.
4 - This comes with a genre, but similar to XCOM, you can miss shots from pretty much point-blank range. This is probably meant to somehow balance the previous two points, but it feels cheap.
5 - AI is incredibly dumb. Like, unfathomably dumb. The most danger you are in usually is by underestimating how much damage they can push to you, and if you are just unlucky and they manage to hit your tank with a rocket 3 times in a row. Mostly they will just shuffle around aimlessly, until they see someone in your team and then shoot (maybe).
6 - I liked the way load customization works, but wanted upgrades to tank to scale more. For example, I don't understand why I want an upgrade to thread defence that gives me, let's say, 75HP, when I have two parts that have the same size in total, and they sum up also to 75HP. IMO it makes more sense for the large parts to sum up to more than the little, because it's harder to fit them into your machine.
7 - I guess I should point out that maps had lots of variety, and without the order-spam tactics, will force you to change your roster and tweak what you have to do to win. I wish there could be more details in the briefing part of the set up about what can we expect, because there were multiple times where I had to restart an hour-long mission because I had messed up who I've deployed at the start and wasted too much time fixing it during the mission.
8 - Got used to this by the end, but some of the unskippable "flare" type of stuff takes a bit too long: calling for a medic, issuing orders, receiving potential buffs leads to an unskippable animation, that sometime feels like a waste of time. At the same time, there's no way of knowing in the moment what do those animations imply - you still have to sift through a couple of menus to figure out what exactly does "Tank Lover" means.
I can't say I hated the experience, but given the hype I've heard about this game, I was certainly disappointed, and from what I've heard about VC4, I don't think I'll be playing that one.
