Azur Lane | Let's Play

Review

Story

The nations of the world has long been at war but was disrupted by the arrival of the Sirens, a faction of humanoid aliens capable of destructive naval power. Due to that, humanity formed an alliance called Azur lane and developed the Kan-Sen, the ship girls that we know of. With the help of the Kan-Sen, humanity was able to fend off the Sirens but due to the different ideologies of the nations and the lack of common enemy reverted the world to it's warring state again and the alliance was broken into two opposing sides. One was Azur Lane which is composed of Eagle Union, Royal Navy, Dragon Empery, Iris Libre and the Northern Parliament while the other one is Crimson Axis which is composed of Iron Blood, Sakura Empire, Sardegna Empire and Vichya Dominon. While the ongoing feud between nations continues, the Sirens who went into hiding are secretly plotting for their re-emergence once again.

Do note that the Azur Lane narrative is continuing and you don't exactly start at the beginning of the storyline. I started the game during a french event and the Sakura Empire flagship at that time was Nagato when she was just unsealed from the sacred tree. It's different nowadays, (long story short) she already passed the torch to Musashi.

Gameplay

The sidescrolling bullet hell gunplay was not that fun to be honest and I don't like bullet hell type of games in general. Thankfully you have an auto feature where you can let the game use bots to finish off missions for you if you already ran them yourself and three-stared the mission requirements. Progress is going through the campaign missions which has its own storyline as well. But doing the dallies everyday will still count as progress albeit slow compared to the regular grind. Just make sure you completed the campaign missions from chapter 1 to 8, anything beyond those is what I call stress test chapters. Stress test chapters are not required from my observation and is only useful for testing out on how strong your fleet is and how diverse your ship collection was because there are certain missions in there that requires specific quirky ships. If you want the challenge then you are welcome to venture in those later chapters.

Researching for hours and going through every blog to research for the best equipments was the most fun that I had in this game, next to dressing up skins and dorm decorations.

Graphics

( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°) it's a simple game and the "graphics" were fantastic if you know what I mean.

Sound

They really diversified the background music this time and we now have 5 of them, 4 on the menu and 1 on the battle scene which is quite good. While the voicelines are superb as always, my favorite is Richelieu specially her Artillery Shot voice script.

Performance

Samsung A02s (Released: 2021, CPU: Octa-core 1.8 GHz Cortex-A53, GPU: Adreno 506, RAM: 4GB, Internal Storage: 64GB)

It's not a resource heavy game and will still probably run on older phones. The UI Navigation is smooth with a little downtime of like 5 seconds which occurs once on the game startup. The bullet-hell gameplay is smooth except in some scenarios (events/challenges) where there a lot of projectiles/game objects on the screen and the game starts acting jittery. It also jitters once when an animated 3D skin loads on the screen. Overall the game is optimized and runs well on my device.