Simply amazing!

Loved the storg and the emersive expiriance.
Can't wait to hear the next book!
Hope it's as good as this one!

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worth persevering

the 1st book I found difficult to get into and reviewed accordingly, critically commenting on weak background start and almost immediate submerging into long mmorpg gaming stat narrative which made it difficult to empathise with the characters. this second book kept me interested and although still essentially a game walk through there are hints that there might be more to this than that. if your not a gamer you wont like this story but I am going to keep listening, hopefully it improves from book to book

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Not bad story, but with issues.

The overall story is not that bad, but I found that as the whole book revolved around him doing one dungeon it got dragged out far to much for me. More so when he keeps harping on about caring for his people - which honestly sounds really lame - and then he spends all this time running a dungeon with a bunch of nnobs way under level for the dungeon. Only players I've seen do this in MMO's are usually those looking to get their ego stroked by lower level players. From the book point it makes so little sense when he is risking his nightmare quest to do it and quite literally leaving people sick and in pain while he does so.

Yes, he does get to level his healing doing it, but really silly way to do it and only luck doesn't see him dead. This makes me think the character is foolish, not some pro gamer. WHich is another thing. He keeps mentioning it, but so far it seems like he don't care about it that much. He has vaguely tossed up some video to twitch once so far?

My biggest issue that knocked down my enjoyment was believability. This game has far to many issues for people to be likely to play it. Only it being the first full emersion VR game would keep people playing it. For one that MC sees a woman get sexually assaulted and thinks that is going to be okay in a game like this. Is he insane? The lawsuits, the public image and teh complete loss of female players would never see this being ignored. Still given that the MC can't stop completely cringeworthy leering at women's breasts and butts I'm not too shocked he wasn't that bothered. A man or woman checking another out is normal but what he does really is quite cringe.

Next issues with the game is the difficulty. Sure nightmare start you'd expect to be hard, though so hard as to only have a chance with luck? As that is only reason he survived the first part of it. Also the first dungeon is way too hard, and I'm glad he did mention players complaining about it, though he sees them as casuals and noobs pretty much. This first dungeon felt in WOW terms - as he references World of Warcraft a lot - to be raid difficulty or hardcore dungeon mode at best. I played WOW from day one too like the author, ran my own raid guild, raided all end game content from wow vanilla through all expansions, and I would have hated this dungeon. Given this is a noob level area and monsters you could level with would fit that level I'm not sure how he expects people to be able to level enough to fight a level 30 boss, more so when level progress slows from level 25. This content would drive players away in droves. Hardcore and end game content raid guilds make up small percentage of gamers and this would drive casual gamers away, which companies don't do. Hard is fine, this is overboard.

Lazy with his magic. I think he pretty much rips all his spells straight from WoW. I don't expect all authors to make up their own magic systems, but I don't think he changed the name or effects of many of these frost spells from the WoW versions.

MC talks about tanks and healers often being hardest to get into a group. Speaking as someone that mostly raided as a warrior or my priest I can say this was true in wow certainly, and yet I wonder if the author ever played a healer himself? Because he makes the healer class here useless. No-one would play it. First healing spell you get is a ten second cast heal, and the best one he gets later is still a five second cast heal. Why is this so bad? Tanks can die in seconds. In wow a priests greater heal was 2.5 second cast and flash heal was 1.5 without talents added to reduce cast time. Even then you'd have to precast the 2.5 second one if healing a main tank during a raid. Even in five man dungeons the 2.5 could be far too slow if tank was pulling a large group of mobs. In short the heals in this game would be unusable.

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1 person found this helpful

Overuse of adjectives and false tension.

"...into its toothy maw as blood dripped down its toothy maw...", "...Insane rage took over me as I raged...", "Yelling urgently, 'Hold it to your shoulder', I urgently yelled."

Every battle scene is described and narrated as a tense, adrenaline-filled fight that the character is only moments away from losing... but in actuality, they're all easy for him and his "cheat" stats. It becomes more than a little grating.

Overall, the writing and narration are kinda naff, but it's been interesting enough for background noise.

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2 people found this helpful