(REPLAYING FOR SECOND TIME ON PC) I don't recommend this game. In my personal experience, I find playing into the mechanics how the missions suggest is always punished with an uphill battle. 9/10 times the best solution is just to fly straight into the enemy base with armored cover and dump units, regardless of mission details. That strategy becomes cheesy quickly, but remains the only reasonable-feeling and non-RNG approach i've found to get through most situations after the introductory missions. No sense in clearing a path with snipers or bump and cover with small fire teams when you can run the infantry over with an APC and drop some combo of lancer/gren/scout/shock to attack radiators and stationary targets. This also felt like the only viable method of getting high rankings on missions. Plenty of room for skill issue on rankings, but I'm pretty sure speed is the only metric considered on rankings, which feels quite bad and saps the opportunity to have strategic fun.

I've witnessed a strange mechanic behavior as well -- Enemy units don't get intercepted by my own infantry, maybe because of the enemy unit's awareness of invisible boundaries where counterattacks are activated. Trying to fortify an area for counterattacks on advancing enemies was pointless every time. I've saved mid-battle and tested counterattacks out to no avail. For example, you may find that enemy shocktroopers can run past 4 of your own shocktroopers (running in total line of sight, and eventually face to face) and will mow down your units with no friendly unit reaction whatsoever. I've gotten the Hafen to react occassionally, but it's always too late and has never made contact with enemy units. This does NOT happen for friendly units, and your units will get devastated by counterattacks. I've read that some odd behaviors in this port can be tied to your system's framerate, which I have not explored, but if you experience similar problems and want to try to resolve it, limiting your fps may be a good start. Speculatively possible that the port itself runs strangely on a higher end system.

Story is utter garbage, full of eye rolling cringe anime cliche moments. There's also a severe lack of animated cut-scenes here. 85% of the story is just frames of the characters emoting. You could argue that's been the case for the whole series, but I found it much more distracting here.

However, art direction and gameplay reach new heights with this installment. Characters control well and the visuals are gorgeous. The battles are fine tuned as well. There's never a fight that I felt completely overwhelmed in.

It's a serviceable game enough. Albeit about a 5/10. Would highly recommend picking this up on a deep sale. No more than $5. (It's been going on sale pretty cheap during the past few summer and winter sales.)

Hopefully the series continues. I'd love to see a new game with a tighter narrative and more likable characters.

Even thru this game isn't as good as VC1, as it is somehow missing magic that the first game had, it brought some great additions, such as new class and really beautiful graphics. I would be really happy if another VC game was released.

Great game

Not great, not terrible, but I still had a good time playing it. Very underrated franchise. I hope for Valkyria 5.

it still uses denuvo, all my hommies hate denuvo.
Features that doesn't add anything to improve the game or the player experience, should not exist in the first place and should be removed, even worst when those features make things worst.

nostalgia to the max settings, woop woop

Story is trash and it constantly does anime pervert fan service jokes but gameplay is 10/10.