Jump to content
XCOMUFO & Xenocide

Valkyria Chronicles


SaintD

Recommended Posts

It's not exactly X-Com, but still an excellent game to play and there are elements in it that would be good inserted into an X-COM type game. I think there's actually a recent interview somewhere where Julian Gollop commented on how X-Com could've worked like VC.

 

You get several classes of soldiers (with plenty of personalities with their own set of interesting personality traits and skills) and a tank of your very own to act as heavy firepower and/or a moving shield for your ground troops. You can upgrade the tank and upgrade the entire class of different soldier types. There's no such thing as individual stat progression - you upgrade the entire class.

 

During battle, you earn a number of command points each turn. CP are used to give your soldiers moves or to issue squad-level commands (buffs/debuffs/escape etc). You can actually accumulate CP's if you don't spend them all by the time you choose to end the turn. Think of these as your time units, as such. General purpose time units.

 

When you use a CP on a soldier, that soldier gets to move. You then control the soldier from a 3rd person view and get to wander about the map for as long as their action points are available. Action points are fixed for the different classes, but can be upgraded by increasing their training level. Scouts and engineers for example have a great amount of action points to move about but are only lightly armed. Lancers and snipers are really tough anti-tank and anti-personnel units, but they can't move far.

 

Tank requires 2 CP to move, but it's very heavily armed and it's a great way to protect your soldiers from return fire. There are some missions where you don't need to move the tank at all if you use your squad set up right and wisely invest your CP's.

 

There is reaction fire - but it's continuous for as long as you stop to think while your soldier is standing in visual range of the enemy who has seen you. That is to say, if you move and hold still to think about what to do next while there's an enemy soldier shooting at you, the longer you wait, the more you'll lose your hitpoints. But that's just part of the challenge. Works both ways, obviously.

 

There are team attacks which are technically free attacks. If you have say three scouts standing near each other and can all see an enemy trooper, ordering one of them will get all three of them to open fire with their carbines. A great way to take out tougher enemies.

 

Of course, soldiers get the chance to move multiple times for every command point you use on them. This is great as you can get a scout to cover a great length of the map in a single turn to get into a good position to snipe or cover allies from a higher ground, and also you can attack an enemy multiple times for each CP used. However, the amount of available action points the soldier gets is reduced for every CP after the first, so it's not limitless.

 

Most light firearms have unlimited ammo, but the more powerful weapons like grenades, sniper rifle rounds and lancer rockets regenerate ammo each turn. Slowly.

 

Missions have goals, and a time limit, and often you cannot simply do a clean sweep of the map in order to accomplish it. Luckily you can replay many of the missions you've done in the story mode to earn money and experience points (to upgrade the classes) and try different team setups and maybe look for different ways to win the mission. The fast you beat the mission, the better your rank and resources and experience earned.

 

I haven't finished it yet, but yes it's definitely a fun game.

 

- NKF

Edited by NKF
Link to comment
Share on other sites

Please sign in to comment

You will be able to leave a comment after signing in



Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...