Gamer reviews for Valkyrie Crusade
Battle maidens' call for battle!
Valkyrie Crusade is a beautiful and immersive strategy/card game hybrid from Nubee. This IOS/ Android title combines the elements of town building and card battles. You take the role of an unnamed hero and your task to fight powerful arcwitches in the world called the Celestial Realm. Your task is to build your army, in the form of maiden cards and train them to face off these powerful and devastating beings. You also need to build your kingdom through the careful and wise management of your resources and infrastructures.
As soon as you start the game, you may need to download additional files, depending on how far the updates go up to the current date you downloaded the game. Once done, you'll receive helpful tutorials from your trusty shrine priestess. Follow her instructions and you'll get your first hand experience in running your kingdom.
Building your army of maidens and maintaining them isn't free. That said, you'll have to build various buildings and upgrading them to continuously support your needs. There are three resources in the game: gold, ether and iron. It is imperative to have a stable and constant supply of these three resources. You need to build farms to get a supply of gold, Ether Furnaces for Ether and Iron Works for iron. The number of these resource structures you can build will depend on your castle level. After leveling up your castle, you'll be able to build more.
Building and upgrading takes time. Low level structures can be built and upgraded quickly. Higher level buildings take hours, even days to complete the upgrade. Upgrading and constructing buildings also require open or available workshops to cater the required work. Players will start with two workshops which means they can upgrade and/or build two structures at the same time. They can increase the number of workshops to five but they'll need to spend jewels – a premium commodity in the game.
There are also buildings that can increase your Vitality (this is consumed when you're advancing in a campaign or event stage or map), enable you to play mini-games to earn Coins (similar to casinos where you can exchange it for prizes), the number of maiden cards you can carry in battles (you start with three cards but you can carry up to 5), increase your resource storage level, and more. Each resource structure can only hold a fixed amount of resources they produce. Once the maximum amount is reached, they'll stop producing their corresponding resource. Players need to regularly "withdraw" these resources so they'll count towards your stash/ funds. That said, storage structures need to be constructed to increase the amount of resources you can carry at a time.
The whole area is limited to a few blocks only which can be expanded by leveling up your castle and spending resources. The amount of resources and required castle level increases as you purchase three lots. Expanding your territory is necessary as you level up since you'll need valuable space to construct additional buildings.
Aside from resource structures, players can also obtain resources as rewards for completing various quests or picking them up randomly while exploring stages/ map. Be careful not to receive the rewards if it exceeds the maximum amount of resources you can carry; this will cause the exceeding resource to be permanently lost.
Kingdom-building and management aside, you also have to concentrate on obtaining, upgrading, fusing and leveling up maiden cards. The game has over 2000 unique cards, with their own stats, abilities and rarities. Consider them as your characters since you'll need to collect them and build your army using them. Players can obtain cards by summoning (summoning itself has different sub-methods), obtaining them as rewards in campaign/ event maps or as rewards after a battle. Cards range from the basic ranks (N) to the highest rank (HUR – High Ultra Rare?) HURs of course have better states and abilities. Players can also summon a maiden card free once a day.
The game's combat is turn-based but utilizes an elemental system where the opposite element deals almost twice the damage to the other. There are only four elements in the game: light and dark, fire and ice. If a different element type hits a defender it's not an opposite to, the damage will be less. Each card has also different skills. Their effects and activation rates may vary. During combat, players can activate these skills without wasting their turn. That said, if multiple card skills are activated at the same time, they can activate these and still attack normally afterward.
Each card's HP are counted in the form of "soldiers" that back them up. When they take damage from battles, their soldier count goes down. If they lost all their soldiers, they are destroyed temporarily and removed from the battle. They can join the next battle with at least 1 soldier count (probably themselves are counted as well) Restoring soldiers / HP can be done before you engage the next enemy. This action also consumes a corresponding amount of all three resources.
Leveling up your cards increases their attack, defense and soldier count stats. They can level up by gaining experience from victorious battles or by sacrificing unwanted cards to them. There is also a level cap for each cap. The cap will depend for each rank. There's also a Friendship level present in every card. This is basically the intimacy level of a maiden card towards you, her master.
Each card has their own way of expressing this and once you reached LV30 (max), you'll see a "confession scene" where they'll express their feelings. This is not just for display though; a card with full Friendship level will get a 5% bonus to attack and defense. Increasing a card's friendship level can be done by simply winning battles, upgrading, or evolving. Defeating bosses however has more chances of increasing the friendship level.
The game isn't entirely a one-player affair. When exploring campaign or event maps, you'll encounter other players' avatars. You'll have the option to send a friend request to them or just greet them. Either action will net you 50 Friendship Points. Friendship points can be used to summon additional maidens. There's also a chance that the main maiden cards of your friends will help in battle, even during a battle against an area boss or an arcwitch herself. You can also earn additional friendship points by greeting your friends daily or helping them withdraw their resources (can be done three times a day per friend, at 30 Friend Points earned per resource.)
Arcwithes are the main enemies in the game and can be encountered regularly, especially during events. They are very powerful and will often require help from your friends, other players or alliance members to subjugate. Early encounters are manageable since they start off with fairly low levels. As you continue to encounter them, their level gradually increases, making each encounter harder than the last one. The good thing about arcwitch battles however, is that you don't lose any soldiers even if you lost the battle. If ever you get defeated, you can try again by using a Battle Point. This counter shows the number of attempts you can fight an arcwitch. Battle Points are replenished over time so if you run out of BP, just wait it or use an item to recover them.
You can respond to a call for reinforcements by sending your own battle maidens to help deal as much damage as possible to the active arcwitch. Encountered arcwitches have a two-hour expiration. Players who contributed to the fight will receive rewards upon the arcwitch's defeat or escape.
The game's anime-style art, lovely battle background (albeit repetitive), detailed NPC sprites and animated buildings help make the game's visuals outstanding and amazing. Each card is beautifully designed, which will surely captivate player with different tastes. The card designs are lovely though the change in their appearances after evolving them is just a matter of change of color scheme and adding/removing some details. This doesn't make the game any less duller, in terms of graphics.
The background music is fantastic. From the serenating music of your town to the past-paced upbeat tune of battles, you'll appreciate the great sounds. Sound effects are superb and quite immersive as well.
The game requires constant internet connection. This is for a good reason since like any other online game, the games' events and arcwitch encounters are managed by the servers. This will also ensure that your data and progress is synched to the server constantly.
The game is huge, with a lot of things to do that will certainly keep players busy. Frequent events are being held and the game is receiving constant updates. One of the best things about the game is that it's totally free, with full features unlocked and ordinary players' progress is not hindered by the need to purchase Jewels.
This is personally one of the best-looking and immersive games out there. While this is not certainly everyone's cup of tea, this is considered a must for players with experience with TCGs, plain fans of anime-inspired game designs or just those who want to try playing a game that will certainly give hours and hours of entertainment.