Valkyria Chronicles is not a terrible game. I hesitate to even call it a bad game. In many ways, it's promising. The first six or seven missions are quite fun, moderately challenging, and really seemed to be setting the game up to be great.

However, around the eighth mission, the game really takes a dive in quality. It begins to introduce "gimmicks" to levels, such as supertanks that can't be damaged until a cinematic happens, an immortal Valkyrie that can move around the map and one-shot your units, mortars that target random areas and force you to waste movement points to get out of their way, and armored cars that move around a city block.

The gimmicks themselves aren't bad. Advance Wars, for instance, was a franchise that had a lot of them. Huge cannons, giant lasers, tank-devouring blobs, etc., and yet managed to make them quite fun. In many ways, in fact, this game reminds me of the Advance Wars model.

The key difference is that in Advance Wars, it was easy to see how the gimmicks worked. You could easily view the range of the giant cannons or the movement speed of super-tanks. Here, that's not an option. The only way to learn about how the gimmicks work is to experience them firsthand, since there is no way to see their range, movement, or how they operate. As a result, there's no way to fairly deal with these threats without repeating a level a few times or savescumming constantly. If you're like me, and hate cheesing your way through levels, you're forced to replay a level multiple times just to see how the gimmick responds to each new move of yours (Oh, you didn't realize that the turn after the Valkyrie appears, she'd be able to attack all your units except the ones that were hiding behind your tank or the enemy's supertank? Hope you saved at the right turn with your single save slot!).

Honestly, it's very disappointing. The first few missions were quite fun, and I really tried to press on once I started getting to the gimmicks, but ultimately, I can't recommend this game, even if you can get it really cheap. It doesn't reward skill. It just rewards savescumming.