it was a bit meh

The novel starts off pretty cool with an intresting premise and a battle royals style feel, but as you progress the characters start to grate on you and the constant paranoia of the main character eats away at the enjoyment of the book as a whole. The performance was of a high standard.

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2 people found this helpful

Interesting mechanics and world building

With this collection consisting of the first two books in this series, the long runtime could either be a positive due to the good value or a negative if the pacing of the story dragged, luckily for this book it tends towards the former with a story that opens strongly with good pacing and escalation throughout.

In a lot of these type of books, the real world is very quickly disregarded with the game world taking centre stage, but that is not the case with this book where the "game world" is also a real (but alien) world and the levelling also alters the players in reality. The intrigue and issues build rapidly for both locations with some surprising developments adding additional links between the two as well.

The narrator does a good job overall, providing a strong and diverse range of voices for the varied cast in a manner that nicely enhances the listener's enjoyment of the book.

Overall, a strong collection that ends with a dramatic change that should lead to an interesting follow up.

[Note - I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.]

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2 people found this helpful

Couldn't put it down

Impressive for a 31 hour book, I struggled to put it down. I recieved a review copy of this book, but it is a struggle to review it without spoiling it. The world building is incredible, encompassing not only a distopian earth but also a functioning "game world". The story starts with an underlying mystery that you unravel with the main character as the story progresses. For every discovery, the mystery only gets deeper. The entire book is filled with action and discovery with each event building on the last.

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1 person found this helpful

It's meh.

Overly dramatic and constant dire situations that never reach any real completion before one situation leads into another situation that's apparently even direr than the last. Combine this with a seriously "catty" main character that believes in lying to get what they need and feels unabashed in doing so, and just loves justifying the "ends justify the means" on just plain narcissistic grounds. It's... Well, it's a chore at times to get through,

There is an interesting world here... Or at least, it started interesting. It gets a little lost in the second half as the author doesn't seem to like their own constraints enough to be consistent. Or perhaps later have thought things through a little more thoroughly and decided it doesn't fit with the story they are trying to tell. Much to the story detriment, unfortunately, as there's a couple of instances where sudden new explanations that contradict previous ones given collide to leave you with a profound, 'erm, no?' moment.

The narration is also considerably sub-par, having to be sped up to 1.4-1.5x to sound like what you'd expect 1x to be.

It's good for background noise when you have nothing else. I can't really recommend it.

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So dour,

So dour so depressing, audible give your head a shek and your staff for letting this drivel make it on to your reading list, i want my credit back 🤨

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