Crosswave gets a thumbs up for being harmless fun, but as a "game" it has some pretty profound flaws. For the most part, it's a visual novel with a sprinkling of short and simple arcade-style battles. While the gameplay in those short battles (they last at most a few minutes each, and maybe thirty seconds if you're kitted out) is certainly adequate, everything outside of the VN scenes gets overwhelmed by the grind; level up your ship girls, level up your affinity, level up your gear, find those rare gold items, and so forth. There is some nuance to fleet building through combo bonuses and the different little abilities of all the ship girls, but good luck noticing any real impact through the number-slamming. Getting through the main story is pretty painless, all things considered, but if you want to 100% this thing then settle in for some serious grinding.

Conversely, the visual novel side is rather expansive, and as mentioned above you would probably be best advised to think of Crosswave as more of a visual novel with a 3D mini-game bolted on. Tons of scenes, tons of characters, tons of voice acting, and so on. If you get a kick out of cute military cyborgs being cute all over then you're in luck, friend. You can even go polygamous and marry them all, though fair warning some of the ship girls are like twelve years old so YMMV. There's no steamy stuff, just a scene where they stammer out "I do" and some new menu dialogue.

So yeah, thumbs up for being what it is; a visual novel with a minor battle system included for flavor. The 3D models are pretty nice, too 👍