Warcross by Marie Lu

Warcross by Marie Lu
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I went into this with dreams of another Ready Player One. RPO has surprised me by becoming one of my all time favorite books, and not because of the movie they made. It stunk.

Sadly, Warcross is no Ready Player One. It is a decent idea, plagued by multiple drawbacks. The characters are annoying. The plot is as holey as swiss cheese. The setting is a waste of a virtual space.

Characters: Emika seems like a weak, powerless character who for some reason is taking out bad guys while on a skateboard. What? This makes no sense, other than a potentially flashy book cover/movie poster. And then there is Hideo, with all of his internal anguish and unexplainable tech genius. He is a mishmash of so many fantasy characteristics (rich, attractive, genius) and antagonistic roles (insane, dictator, control freak) that in the end he didn't make sense either. He was a too perfect as a good guy, and too perfect as a bad guy that it left him, in my mind, not a person at all.

Plot: Why didn't Zero try to recruit Emika from the beginning? She apparently had some hacking skill, and then was obviously in a useful position, but that didn't even come up. Then, the first time they met, why not just tell her what he was about? If this game has professionals, no amateur is going to hang with them. That is how being a professional at something works.

Setting: Why does Emika need to be physically close to someone to hack them? How come she hacks everyone, and never gets hacked herself? Why is there an awesome VR world all centered on ONE GAME? That is the craziest part. It is like the XBOX/Playstation/Nintendo shows up with one game and everyone is just like, boom, that's all we need. Never need another game. It would never go down like that. (To get an idea of how it WOULD go down, check out RPO, or if you're into serial murdering psychopaths, Otherland by Tad Williams.)

To be fair, I might be overly critical given the expectation set by RPO. That is possible. Yet, when I look at these issues, they do all seem to stand on their own. And in the end, all I feel toward this book is disappointment.