Warcross by Marie Lu is a science fiction young adult novel based on a virtual reality video game. When hacker Emika Chen glitches herself into a live Warcross match, she’s hired by the games creator to seek out another mysterious hacker. But to cover up Emika’s true objective, she must act as an official Warcross team player.
An interesting conspiracy unravels as Emika investigates the players around her to figure out who has been tampering with the game world. The book uses a number of red herrings to throw off the reader, but before long you’ll be able to piece together the end result, for the most part.
Marie Lu’s use of descriptions to describe the games can be somewhat difficult to imagine in your mind. But when she begins to describe the dark web —a subsection of the virtual world where hackers and bounty hunters lurk— her writing becomes more layered. In the end I wanted to learn more about the dark web than the Warcross game itself. This is not necessarily a bad thing because follow up books are still to come that should vastly expand the Warcross world and allow us to get a deeper dive into the dark web.
I found some of the characters in Warcross shallow and not entirely fleshed out. Emika’s team mates are the biggest victims of this as you only get an understanding of them on the surface level. It left me feeling like there was more to be understood about this characters, but no payoff is given for them. Even Emika herself doesn’t feel as developed as the books true standout.
The creator of Warcross is named Hideo Tanaka and he’s described as an international celebrity after creating both the Neurolink headset and the Warcross game. From the first encounter with this character you get a sense that there’s much more to him than meets the eye. Emika eventually begins to learn about him and his past, and by the end of the book he becomes a bigger factor.
The book ends on a cliffhanger that will leave you wondering about the next book. With how the story develops, I truly believe that the scope of the story has expanded in a big way. The sequels of Warcross will no doubt be able to tell a grander story than this first one, and I’ll be there for the ride when the next book releases later this year.
