Valkyria Chronicles 4 review: Same as ever

Turn-based tactics with a touch of action game. It's the simple and powerful blend that made the original Chronicles of Valkyria so immediately in 2008. Now, two PSP suites and a pseudo-spin-off badly designed later, this formula returns to the consoles in Valkyria Chronicles 4. It has the same hooks as this original game, including watercolor and pencil graphics and many animal relationships to create combat hours for 35 hours.

In fact, although this is the fourth game in the series, VC4 even returns to the original conflict of the series – a sort of alternative Nordic flavor story of the Second World War. An evil empire (a fantastic mixture of Nazi Germany and the USSR) invades the "Atlantic Federation" and a team of brave volunteers from Gallia (essentially imaginary Holland) joins in to bring the fight back to the fascists.

All these beats are so much like this first game that VC4 looks almost like a gentle restart of the original rather than a secondary story.

More things do not change

The fight and progression have been simplified compared to the previous ones. The battle starts from an aerial perspective, but switches to a shoulder view when you select a unit. From there, you can move your units in real time, limited only by the soldier's "action points". While aligning shots as in any shoulder shooter, the precise purpose of a weapon is out of your control. It is JRPG's mathematics that lurks behind the scenes – massed by the placement of your reticle – to ground shots and critical head shots.

Unlike most tactical games, you are not limited to one action per unit and per turn. Each turn, you receive a number of "command points" to spend as you please. Each move costs one point of command, but they can be spent on any unit you like. Ammunition and diminishing action points limit the maneuvers of most soldiers.

You usually have to divide your actions between classes. Valkyria the games work with a rock-paper-scissors-esque combat model. Spearmen launch anti-armor rockets that are ideal for taking out tanks, but they are too imprecise to be used against the infantry. In the same way, shock captors tear personnel down with machine guns and flamethrowers, but they can not put a brake on vehicles.

Deciding where to place which classes is half the fun – and often the frustration – of VC4. Most missions are played almost like puzzles. Send a fast and fragile scout to the heart of enemy territory could give a grenadier the line they need to mortar a valuable target. Again, this grenadier could be equipped with an anti-vehicle launcher if he really needs an anti-personnel weapon. Or maybe your scout is shot by covering the fire even before seeing his target.

The single position fight is exciting, but c4 is also in its fair share of the unexpected circumstances to which you must adapt. Special mogul units will literally explode in the middle of the mission. Enemies you thought dead can be resurrected with special commands –Chronicles of Valkyria"Equivalent to map-wide spells that can improve and heal teams on either side.

Surprises and peaks of difficulty

The problem is that VC4 is a very linear game. Each mission is more or less exactly according to its script, each time. After the surprise, the best solution is often to simply quit, reload and try again with a team composition that meets all your "unexpected" needs.

VC4 works best when you do not do it need to do this. You can sacrifice command points to evacuate and summon new predefined campmen to almost any battlefield. This allows you to refine your tactics on the fly, giving you the satisfaction of sliding your opponent's traps rather than winning each victory with the optimal composition of the jump.

For the majority, VC4 offer this satisfaction. It is only towards the end, when the game starts to rely on absolutely insurmountable boss battles, that money savings become absolutely mandatory.

The tanks and the common soldiers are finally replaced by enemies who shoot you automatically during the movement of one or the other team, without even passing their actions of attack. That means that they can kill your troops with a single automatic fire your tower. Then, they launch unpredictable artillery strikes that tear the tanks.

Even bumping the game into easy mode, making it unnecessary to defeat normal enemies, barely affects these inescapable killing machines. What is worse, in fact killing them, usually requires repetitive, hyper-specific and specific units. For example, a late boss was vulnerable only a short time after I shot his weak point – twice – with a sniper rifle. Then I had to move a shocktrooper a short distance from the back to shoot them in the head.

But the boss's head receded as soon as she began to suffer damage. I had to predict where the weak point would be after this animation started. Otherwise, the boss healed so soon after. Of course, then I had to blow more control points by evacuating my shocktrooper, because everything that was near the boss in the next turn was dead instantly.

Certainly, this is my most egregious example of VC4Difficult absurd pics. But this perfectly illustrates the flaws of the game to make the fighting more difficult. It relies too much on complications that terminate the mission, making tedious hammering on the "Retry battle" button a lot easier than thinking about your feet. This is something that the series has known since the first match.

A fitting end

Fortunately, the game comes back in the latest missions. During this last game, the match was difficult in a way that was the same as in the team's maneuvers. And if you are completely stuck, there are always side quests that will expand the relationships of your squaddies while raising valuable experience points.

These "squad stories" are not very involved – just one mission and dialogue to flesh out three characters at a time. Never is enough enough to ensure that any otherwise useless soldier appears more than an archetype of anime. For example, you have your little sister cliche and a farm boy in love with nature. Despite this, it gives more life to what could have been nameless bodies that swayed weapons.

The handle of members of the main distribution is much better. I particularly like Minerva, the stuck rival of your squad leader. VC4 is usually quite light, but it enters a darker territory as its continental conflict spreads. Minerva does a great job painting this human cost as something personal, but also necessary.

Valkyria Chronicles 4 does not do much to mechanically advance the series. On the contrary, it seems a bit of a resetting – a reintroduction on both home consoles and English territories. But his tonal balance between anime and war drama is clearer than ever. I suspect that the peaks of difficulty will push many people, but it's a journey that is worth completing if you can get there.

Good

• Watercolor and pencil style still as beautiful 10 years later
• A better balance of war stories and anime interactions
• The real-time / turn-based combat hybrid is an innovative mix

The bad

• Boss fight and difficult fights
• The arcs of character are often clichés
• A bit simplified compared to previous suites

The ugly one

• Take an hour to kill a single leader even after putting him in easy stride

Verdict:

Try it You do not need to play previous games to enjoy this parallel story of turn-based tactics in a fantasy World War II. You will need a lot of patience for character archetypes and huge difficulty peaks.