Remember, when a game company is good at something, they capitalize the thing they are good at while making the game. For the instance of Azur Lane: Crosswave, it is visual novel. You heard me, it is a visual novel at core. It tries it's worst to hide itself as 3d action shooter game, but fails miserably at it. To put it simply, it is 90% visual novel and 10% action. You can buy the game yourself to see for yourself, I'm not stopping you.
I will rant about the game before talking about good stuff.
RANT:
Battles are incredibly easy. You just enter, a second passes and you win, congratulations, yipee, here some money. Like, no challenge at all?! Seriously, no challenge at all?! What kind of lazy dumbass does that? I hear you, you want to make us dive into the beautiful and smokey world of azur lane but at least put up a challenge in battles. Even then, you're not good at storytelling at all! The story of this game is extremely boring, it is about a multinational military joint that has no connection to real events and the original story of the mobile counterpart! They could make it thrilling and appealing, but they decided not to; because it would be a great excuse to call it a 'fan service game' when there is no redeeming quality in the game! ıt is no brainer for someone to play the mobile version if they want fan service, mobile has plenty of those. You could at least do something different, something exciting, something mindblowing. By the way, this game is scripted to be played with a xbox controller, if your sorry mind think that you can play the game on keyboard in peace, it is WAY harder than on xbox controller. Say you're navigating the menu, fighting bad guys and what else, keyboard will worsen your experience, I'm saying this because I played the game on keyboard! I mean, games like this tend to have a fate of not having proper keyboard controls but, devs are lazy and nothing is gonna change that. If you played the game for, what, one or two hour, you will realize that these guys are making visual novel games. You will probably assume they will good at it, right? WRONG! Visual novel sections are as same as the mobile Azur Lane, nothing more, nothing less. Since they are releasing this game on pc, they could have made something different and carefully tailored, I don't know, add 3d modes of characters on visual novel scenes, make dynamic cutscenes, I'm naming a few, but even this is too much for them.
All right, rant is done, now let's focus on good stuff.
-All the characters are now in 3-freaking-D! That's awesome!
-Photo mode (although this one only becomes available after the story, but it is a good feature nonetheless.).
-Visual novel scenes are all voiced. Now this is a good thing because the mobile counterpart does not has that.
-You can marry the ships. The thing you're getting is a generic visual novel scene with the waifu speaking, that's the only thing I know about this one, hence I never really used it.
I'm kinda struggling to find the good parts of this game, as I didn't played it that much. If you are a die hard Azur Lane fan, then buy this game. But if you are a regular gamer who is looking for something that looks like an anime and action, I'm sorry, this is not for you. I'm giving this game a negative review based on my own experience, who knows? Maybe you will enjoy this game, maybe you will not, watch the gameplay on youtube to make a decision.
