If you are into strategy games, I can wholeheartedly recommend this game since it's not only beautifully designed, but it is very polished. The game pretty much feels like playing Chess with military units. Each unit has its range, attack power, defense rating, and obvious weakness. Each mission has a CO (Commanding Officer) who has a special power to boost your troops (ranging from Morale Boost, Damage improvements to straight-up orbital weapons). There are various mechanics such as terrain advantage, weather, and occupying buildings to give you an edge.
The game has your typical war story of Kingdom A vs Kingdom B and their military tribulations. Nothing groundbreaking in terms of story that would be worth a Hollywood script.
The good:
- Beautiful graphics and manga art style. Ranging from the voice acting to the different character designs.
- Bugfree and polished. It runs really well!
- The different missions are different and varied enough to make you feel as if they are different despite having the same core mechanics.
- Fun to play and is a wonderful strategy game.
The bad:
- Some COs feel better than others. They aren't balanced and are mainly situational. They should rebalance them. There is no way a CO with increased movement can outmatch a meteor strike, which can kill 3 units and increase Attack and Defense by 150%. The only way it would work is if that increased movement allowed you to go behind units and outflank them.
- The missions are sometimes "stiff" in the sense that you have to beat the mission in a certain way to win and there is little leeway available to complete it otherwise.
- The enemy AI can get stuck when it evaluates that its unit cannot take on your unit, so it will just stand there stacking up reinforcing troops behind the unit, blocking itself in the process.
- The enemy AI has a much larger range of attack than you... For example, a "rocket launcher" has twice the range as your rocket launcher in the very same position, which is somewhat unfair.
- Defending is often a more viable option than attacking, especially in the later missions. You just stack your units in a "Roman shield formation with rockets and artillery behind" and take out most of the enemy forces. Then you generally do a counteroffensive and win. The enemy AI will simply blindly dash into your wall of tanks.
- The price is quite high, but that shouldn't really be an issue since you can buy it used.