As above, I picked it up today and whatever I said out of this article largely hold true, namely that this is a great-looking game that is well-polished and a refreshing experience, though it has some flaws that keep it from being as smoothly tactical as it should be.

To add a note about the character development options not available in the demo, it works well as you can spend resources to research and upgrade new weapons (all looking decidedly WWII), and when you upgrade a class everyone levels up simultaneously, so there's no chance of level-lag for the bit players and you can thus be freer to use characters as appropriate. Buy it.

Actually, I'm really just doing this because I found out that Raita Honjou is the main visual designer. Also known as Zettai Shoujo, Raita has made many interesting NSFW doujinshi, for Fate/Stay Night, Mai-HiME, Azumanga Daioh (Sakaki-san!), and his style has carried forward into the game (sans the NSFW, sadly).

I don't know if he thought of the idea for the super-cool cel-shading effect, but if he did he deserves a big fat bonus. I'd also give him a bonus if he made some h-doujinshi for his own game, kthxbai. d(-_-)b

Anyway, here's some random stuff from his site:

The uniforms he made for VC look great, like these:


The propensity for designing awesome tanks (and cute lolis) is clear from some of his releases


Also cool armor. You'll get to that when you go further into the game.


Also, Kill Bill

If you look up his various doujinshi (you know where), you can see the rest of this image: