A couple of thoughts I’d like to put forth on this. While its true that sandbags alone provides a place for your soldiers to crouch behind, line of sight is what matters about whether you can get hit or not. Using your own tank as cover for your infantry to pass through reaction fire is important, as is using buildings and walls on the battlefield. If the enemy doesn’t have line of sight on you they can’t shoot you, so there’s plenty of full cover available.
While I agree that there’s some times some strange level geometry you can be hindered by I never found myself stuck on anything. I’ve also found myself trying to fire around a corner or barrier that looked completely clear only for my soldier to just empty their clip into a mostly invisible wall. It’s a bit annoying but it is pretty consistent with it so it’s something you soon figure out how to deal with. The cross-hair also shows an indicator if you have a line of fire or not.
Many times I’ve felt the game could really do with an undo action, many tactics RPGs lets you feel out movement and reset if you don’t like the outcome. But then most such games gives you full information about the battlefield. Valkyria chronicles does not and getting to scout things out would change the games fundamentals. But it is rather annoying when you thought for sure you’d reach cover but fall a few steps short.
The story is very slow and I’m not too greatly a fan of the style in which it is delivered, though I feel the first game was worse in this regard. In between missions you just sit around and watch either an elaborate visual novel or a pretty stilted anime. The story really does pick up, though it never ceases to be stupid.
Not sure what your framerate issues is but it does sounds like Vsync failing to reach 75 and locking itself to half, as it’s supposed to. As is unfortunately the case with most Japanese console games they’re not always perfectly ported to PC so I can see why it might run into an issue with unexpected things like a 75Hz monitor. Try to maybe turn off vsync and set “target fps” to 90?
I have experienced no issues with lag or odd frame rate problems on my 60Hz monitor.
If you didn’t enjoy the game play as it stands at the 3rd mission then I don’t know if further missions will change your mind much. Though if you did enjoy the game play but got hung up on the many little oddities, I would perhaps recommend giving it another shot another day.
I like the game quite a lot.