Warcross

 Book Title: Warcross

Author: Marie Lu

Series: Warcross #1

Date Started: November 27th 2021

Date Completed: December 10th 2021

Genres: Sci-Fi, Romance, Action, Mystery

Quality Rating: Three Stars

Enjoyment Rating: Three Star

Final Rating: Three Stars

Review:

I knew going in that Warcross was unlikely to be my favourite thing ever but I was hoping it would be entertaining. This was exactly what I got, so I shouldn't really complain - ultimately I just wasn't super convinced by anything or anyone in this book so while it was perfectly fine while reading it's certainly not going to stay in my memory for long. Its setup is quite familiar, the tropes are well-trodden, and its twists are predictable from the start (yet still dissatisfying when we got there).

Overall, my feelings are just that the book was... wishy-washy? The relationships are given a lot of importance towards the end with very little actual build-up throughout the book itself. The whole thing felt a little vague in general, with the timeline skipping chunks of events to progress the story faster, but leaving the development of side characters in the dust in the meanwhile.

The rules of the game was a little confusing and ended up inconsistent (each player has a 'role' in their team; for example, our protagonist Emika is an architect who is supposed to manipulate the level they're in to favour her team - yet all the actual rounds just end up as a race to collect power-ups? And then the black market is selling illegal power-ups that give people that ability to manipulate the level they're in?? What???). These action-heavy sections were then quite hard to follow though, honestly, the competition felt obsolete anyway, being used just as a framing device. We only properly see two rounds, with others skipped over and summarised, and the drama happening outside of them.

Warcross is a perfectly entertaining read if you don't mind not having a super fleshed-out world and story. I will say that, while you don't have to go into specifics of worldbuilding all the time, in a technologically-advanced worldwide game championship with rules that are being broken by the antagonist, it's sort of important that the system holds up so the reader can follow what's happening.