The story is pretty simple. Air and sea travel has been made impossible by a large-scale war. Cities have been isolated and contractors called Blademen have been hired by a foreign business to safeguard the city from bug mechs. A terrorist group with really nonsensical ideas called Hound is also causing problems and the Viper team finds itself in the middle of a conspiracy. The story does some things well. The setup is pretty interesting and, when you find out the nature of the conspiracy, a lot of the seemingly nonsensical elements do end up making some sense. But the story still has a couple major issues. Instead of developing their characters naturally in the narrative they have several episodes that barely connect to the main story in which they inundate you with backstory. Because that's much better than learning about a character naturally. The story is also pretty minimal, when they do get to the main plot what you actually get is a lot of action sequences with short bursts of story. The ending is also a load of crap, but I can't go into details about why without spoilers.
Let's move into the characters. To Viper's Creed's credit, they do try to develop the six major characters and it works, they are three-dimensional characters. The major problem is with the supporting cast, which is composed largely of one-dimensional characters and the antagonists who barely get any motivation. Another problem is that some of the major characters are just unsympathetic. The main example of this being Haruki who goes beyond naive and into the realm of being a complete moron. The worst part is that his complete idiocy is barely questioned.
Let's talk about the art for a moment. The machines in this look really good. The action scenes are really intense and well done. That being said, they do some bizarre things with faces and the backgrounds are pretty lazy most of the time.
The voice acting is good. Toyoguchi Megumi, Kuroda Takaya, Minagawa Junko and several others do well in their roles. The one real exception is Akiyama Nana who gives a rather uninspired and flat performance. I haven't heard her in anything else so I couldn't tell you whether this was the direction, inexperience or just a lack of ability at expressing emotions. I'm not even going to bother speculating on it. Then there's the music, a lot of it just doesn't work with the series. It's just too soft and serene for the action-packed content.
The yuri factor is a 1/10. There's no yuri in this.
My final rating for Viper's Creed is a 6/10. It does have some major issues, but it also has some great characters and great action scenes. If you can handle the story issues and the more minor issues then it is a decent watch.
