Valkyria Chornicles (PS3)

A hybird turn based strategy and role-playing game mixed with a bit of real-time strategy, Valkyria Chronicles tells the alternate-universe world war story of Welkin Gunther.

Both the story and gameplay are told using a unique rendering system that outputs water-color like images. Both the story and characters have are interesting and have a fair amount of depth. Gameplay consists of deploying a fixed number of units on the map who have various different abilities. Each side has a fixed number of orders than give during a turn. When a unit is selected to take action, the camera switches to a third person view and the player controls that unit in real-time. While the outcome of an attack is partially based on the units stats, player controlled factors such as aim and positioning do play a major part in the outcome. Strategically all the different units are well balanced and there aren’t any uber-unit that works well in all situations. You can train or enhance each unit with points you earn based on your performance in each scenario. Voice acting is standard JRPG fare and is probably one of the few areas that Valkyria Chronicles could use improvement. Otherwise, if you like either JRPGs and turn-based strategy games it would be hard to go wrong by picking up a copy of this game.