Review for Azur Lane Crosswave. Game for PlayStation 4, PC and Steam, the video game was released on 29/08/2019
Azur Lane Crosswave is the first in a series of console video games based on some of the most popular Gacha games who go crazy on the mobile market, or at least the first to arrive here, with Granblue Fantasy Versus still relegated to the East alone. Unfortunately, however, unlike the promising Granblue themed projects, Azur Lane Crosswave fails to build an experience capable of elevating the title from a simple mobile game to a video game capable of having its say in the much more competitive console market. With rather flat content and a game system unsuitable for console gaming, Azur Lane Crosswave relegates itself to being a product suitable primarily for existing fans of the series, turning out to be not an evolution of the brand, but a simple advertising tool for the much more profitable mobage.
From what can be seen from the brief introduction, Azur Lane Crosswave should be a decisive rejection, however the speech is not so simple. We have invested several hours in the title, trying all its (few) modalities and although everything we mentioned in the first paragraph remains true, we cannot deny that we enjoyed ourselves in the company of the ships from anime wars. The gameplay consists of a 3D revision of the original game: we will be able to control up to 3 characters in short rather fluid and fun Shoot'em Up sections, seasoned with a graphic sector that is all in all very nice and suitable for the context.
The music does a good job of accompaniment and at high difficulty Azur Lane Crosswave can bring a lot of fun thanks to the good gameplay base.
The problems begin to appear, however, when the title has to develop this basic content which unfortunately remains completely unchanged throughout the course of the adventure and beyond. Azur Lane Crosswave behaves like a gacha game but in this context its behavior is out of place: the missions are short, designed to be completed in just 120 seconds and if this element works very well in a mobile or portable context, it is penalizing on next-gen home consoles such as PlayStation 4 and PC, where levels of only two minutes constantly interspersed with dialogues and uploads greatly impact the experience. The short duration of the battles also limits the game design, which in fact remains unchanged from start to finish, consisting of a simple loop of: preliminary bossfight, trash mob to separate the phases, final bossfight.
The character enhancement system itself is based on mission repetition and farming, and while it is not necessary to farm to complete the game - not even in its extra challenges - the inclusion of a customization system based on it denotes even more like Crosswave does not want to be an evolved Azur Lane for consoles, but an Azur Lane that can advertise the series through a product sold on consoles.
The content itself worsens the situation, with a very short adventure mode that only counts on a part of the many characters available in the mobage. Speaking of the characters themselves, although the technical realization of the models is very nice, at the level of gameplay they can be summarized in 3 types of characters mere copies with different models. The roster is certainly large, even if it does not constitute the entire cast of the mobile game, however the limits of its gameplay do not exploit this breadth.
The basic gameplay, the pure naval battle, in its chaos is very fun but we can't help but think about how, without the mobage-like structure limit that they have chosen to adopt, it would have been possible to do much more than just recycling the same situation in dozens of missions and challenges.
Ultimately Azur Lane is a game recommended only for fans of the mobile game. With many dialogues and very nice models Azur Lane Crosswave is a product of a pure commercial nature, designed to advertise the mobile game with a product for consoles. However the very high price and the lack of appreciable fan content make it hard to think anyone could get hooked on Azur Lane thanks to Crosswave.
► Azur Lane Crosswave is an RPG type game developed by Idea Factory and published by Compile Heart for PlayStation 4, PC and Steam, the video game was released on 29/08/2019
