OVERSTAYS IT'S WELCOME
I played this game religiously for a good month until I finished it but I can only say that I only really enjoyed up to the 11 mission and after that the other 8 just seemed to really drag on. I recommend the game because it's controls are good, the story is good (a bit cheesy) and it has some great graphics and OMG moments that are exhilarating, along with a real sense of reward after managing to complete a level. The downside of the game was that every mission can take about 2 hours, with no checkpoints. You get a maximum of 20 turns and if you make a bad decision at some point (or one of your stupid soldiers misses at point blank range that sends your entire strategy to hell) then you have to restart the mission from the start. This is extremely frustrating as the mission maps get increasingly larger and harder that in the end it becomes a chore to keep playing and the sense of reward becomes instead a feeling of relief and reluctance to move on. You can control your players on the map which starts with a birds eye view but then heads down to ground level where you have a sort of time bar that go down at every step or move you make. You aim at enemies but whether or not you hit them is completely random. Maybe I'm too impatient or too much of a control freak, but this annoyed the hell out of me, not the turn system, but the randomness of it. If you could save at any point during a mission or if there were check points at the least I would've found this more enjoyable in the longrun. For people that like to build up player stats and waste hours tweaking machinery and tinkering with weapons then this game has loads of it. If your one of those people like me then look around for a cheap copy and play it until you hate it. Anyone else, I can totally reccomend this thought provoking, exciting(while everything is good) frustrating little anime game.