Review originally made for my youtube channel:
Hello guys, Forospect Gaming here with my first review, and boy is it a first review to do, I'll be looking at Azur Lane: Crosswave and if it'll be worth shelling out a whole $40 or worth wiping your ass with the very same money. Now what is the story of Azur Lane: Crosswave you might ask? Well it follows Shimakaze and Suruga, two up and coming newbies in the Sakura Empire, which is a stand in for Japan. They're competing in a multinational competition that the true purpose of and if you don't wanna be spoiled, then why are you still here? Go now because the reason will be stated now, to collect cubes secretly as it will be easier, and to foster greater trust among the discount versions of Germany, United States and the United Kingdom. The cubes are essentially some weird tech that an unexplained, advanced, robotic? Alien race have that hold unimaginable power, and long story short the other nations find out and are told the truth and eventually decide to team up and fight the aliens and use the weapons for good in the form of a council not unlike the United Nations. Not much of a story I'm aware but thats how it is with single A games and sometimes double A games. Now how is the music? The music of Azur Lane: Crosswave, while not amazing by ANY stretch of the imagination, at the very least is tolerable and varied, might I say interesting enough to warrant not being muted. Now, it is not as good as games like Symphony of the Night or Jeremy Soule, but it certainly doesn't have the amateurish, insultingly terrible markings of Koichi Sugiyama's work, particularly Dragon Quest 11s soundtrack. Now, on to the potatoes of the game. The quote on quote gameplay of Azur Lane: Crosswave consists of moving from tiny square to tiny square after completing a goal, usually destroy some ships, a character, or aircraft, or a combined variation of sorts. The environment you fight in is water that looks like paint with some icebergs and mountains sparsely in the distance, all of which have the texture quality of an Xbox 360 game at best. Rinse and repeat for at most 3 minutes. There isn't much to combat apart from circling and strafing, holding or pressing the trigger, bumpers, and x button until the enemy is dead, after a few rounds you'll be sleeping due to how mind numbingly tedious, easy, and repetitive it is. At least for easy difficulty, and even then enemies as bullet sponges and as there's no benefit to playing on higher difficulties, why even bother? And if you're not struggling through the combat without wanting to kill yourself, you'll be doing, reading, a lot of reading, now cutscenes and Story are all good, fine and dandy really, however the story in Azur Lane isn't very good, in fact it is quite serviceable at best barring a few moments. I suppose this is a saving grace that they at least made an attempt at story, characters, character development, even if it is half-baked. The issue with all this is, as far as I can tell, based purely off Crosswave, it was not advertised as being more of a visual novel, which even if it was that it would still be a painfully mediocre game. These go for the story mode and the optional extreme battle, and urgent battle scenarios in the game, where you fight increasingly harder enemies up to level 200, and there are 110 of these. And since the story mode can easily be beaten within 13 hours possibly quite a bit less, if you really want to you can test your mettle so to speak in these. The only reason to engage in extreme battles is if you want to platinum the game or marry a character though, or maybe unlike a character episode, however that requires playing through 100 of these battles, and getting an S rank on almost every battle. Speaking of the marriage option for a bit, that requires an S rank on every story mission barring the final chapter, having a character at level 100 and awoken, which requires a special item you need to grind to be able to craft it, use it on them, and then get their affection level to the highest it can be before marriage. Now about the characters…. The characters of Azur Lane are nearly all completely forgettable and the only redeeming quality about some of them are that they are attractive/have good designs and fun personalities, that's all. There isn't too many technical issues in Azur Lane: Crosswave however I did encounter slowdown at least 10 times. At some points it was enough to make me fear the game was going to crash, which it didn't thankfully. Overall, Azur Lane: Crosswave is an outdated, repetitive, pricey visual novel disguised as a third person shooter that will disappoint even those with low expectations. And mind you I put my work into playing this game, more than I even needed to, it took me 53 hours to platinum it, which in my book count as 100 percenting it. If you do pick it up, I implore you to do so when it is on a heavy discount as there is not enough content nor quality content to justify the $40 price tag, and with that I would rate Azur Lane: Crosswave a 5.7/10

Despite what my rating suggests, I'd never recommend this game to anyone. I mean, this game's fine, I guess. And I'm someone whose only prior experience with Azur Lane was the mediocre anime.

I played this game while super depressed and the monotonous gameplay and basic story were perfect for my state of mind at the time. It's not a good game by most means but I really enjoyed it for what it was.

so yeah uhh I guess don't play this game unless you're super depressed and don't care