Minor spoilers are included. They shouldn't take away from your enjoyment tho :D

Normally, I make a review for the principal anime of a series that defines my overall opinion of the series in general. If it's sequel seasons are different enough to warrant another review, I will, but this is the first time I've made exception not for a sequel, but rather for a spin-off. That is why for this review I will mostly compare Slow Head to its parent anime Azur Lane

Azur Lane: Slow Ahead is perhaps one of the smartest moves that whoever was in charge of overseeing Azur Lane's anime productions did. It shows that even if the primary anime went horribly south, something can still be done to save the franchise in the eyes of those outside of its fans.

Slow Ahead was made by the newly formed Yostar Pictures and Candybox Studio, this means that not only is the anime going to feel stylistically different from its parent anime, its also going to be written by people with ties to the original game itself. This overall worked like a charm, as Slow Ahead completely threw plot out the window and openly invited "plot" to completely run its course in these 12 short episodes. This paints Azur Lane in the picture that we the playerbase have seen it since the dawn of its release: Its a cute game about cute girls. Sure there are some events with interesting plots, but you're not here to dive into the plot, you're here to dive into the cleavage of the whatever ship you have as your secretary.

Plot
As I've said before, there is not plot in this anime. Each episode is a short ~10 min long story of the Starter Squad comprised of Ayanami, Laffey, Javelin, and Z23 as they embark on various journeys around the Home Port. Every new episode features more recognizable and loved shipgirls as they do various slice-of-life classics like play basketball with Baltimore, barbecue on the beach with Minneapolis and Rodney, relax in a hot spring with Shoukaku and Zuikaku. Each episode is short, snappy, and has minimal ties with other episodes, effectively making it a snippet of "another day in the lives of the Starter Squad"

This type of plotline works absolute wonders for an anime based on Azur Lane. Why? Because there's a few hundred ships in Azur Lane, and you're not gonna cram them all in a giant plot-centric story about saving the world (Just look at what happened to Iron Blood — A major faction and one of the most important factions in the original games — in the parent anime). Instead, you focus on the best qualities of each and every girl encountered in these snippets. This not only gives you a positive after feeling after the credits roll but it also reinforces what you loved most about each of these girls. With 12 short episodes, these episodes are also infinitely rewatchable and each time you're going to see the same ship that you've had working hard as your secretary in the game or even oathed.

Characters
This was one of the most dividing factors of the parent anime. As I mentioned earlier, Azur Lane has an absolutely giant collection of shipgirls, and it would be impossible to cram them all into one big anime. While the parent anime recognized this, their focus on Enterprise exclusively made the anime bland as hell, especially since they didn't even do much to her character.

Slow Ahead took one look at what happened to the parent anime and said "Yea, we're not doing that." Enterprise, Akagi, Kaga, and the other "protagonists" in the original anime don't make a SINGLE appearance in the entire show (Except for Belfast because we gotta introduce Bel-Chan somehow). Rather, the side characters that didn't get as much screentime, like the Crane Sisters, Bismarck and Eugen, and the Nagatos are given the screentime they properly deserved and a few other well-known and well-liked characters like the aforementioned Baltimore, Minneapolis, and Rodney are added in for a nicely well-rounded cast. No character development is made, and rather, the anime focuses on highlighting the pre-established traits that these characters all possess. This makes it so that we're not staring at cardboard cutouts, but rather the shipgirls we're all so familiar with. That is why this anime overall felt so much more enjoyable to watch compared to the parent anime. It's just less of a toll and you just get to sit back and laugh.

Art
With a change of studio came a change in artstyle. Slow Ahead made the smart choice of using CGI very sparingly and focusing exclusively on animation. The show overall felt very candylike (funny because one of the studios is called CandyBox), it felt very much like a Saturday-Morning cartoon type of anime, and the colors are bright, vibrant, and the animation is simple but detailed and precise. It's the perfect type of animation for a slice-of-life anime such as Slow Ahead.

Not much to be said of music, there aren't any very good bangers, but its not like the music sucked either

Overall, Slow Ahead demonstrates the best of the Azur Lane franchise, its vast list of cute and quirky shipgirls that are sure to catch everyone's eye. And the antics of the Starter Squad will never grow old. Way better, well done.