Great story, great foundation!

Great LitRPG story. This genre can be a mixed bag, but this is one of the good ones. The characters are believable and the group has good chemistry and balance. The action starts slow and builds up at a good pace. The only issues I have are more with the goals of the antagonist outside of the game. I am hoping that the antagonist's goals are not simply financially motivated and are deeper. There are some hint's to that in the first book, but nothing more concrete. Hopefully that will be fleshed out more in the coming books. Honestly story wise this should get a 4 or 4.5, but I enjoyed the book enough to give it a 5. The performance of the narrator was excellent. I look forward to the next book in the series and will pick it up as soon as the audio-book version is available.

Disclaimer: I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review.

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Excellent!!

Such a fun book - great characters, great plot, many laugh-out-loud moments. The narrator did an excellent job making characters come alive. Highly recommend!

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Almost to good

Its taken me far to long to review this,i love these lit rpgs, and this one is totes up my alley, i have wasted a lot of time thinking about where it is going next, im really stoked for a 2nd book!

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

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incredible and fun

such a good and very very interesting story I liked Alex a lot as a character I liked the book you had a very funny moments in it and actually I didn't expect to chuckle so much it was an incredible audio to listen to the narrator it was very very good

I was given this free review copy audiobook at my request and have voluntarily left this review

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narrator audibly breathes in. con stant ly.

the audio quality is barely ok in itself. quite low range. hints of noise.

but the breathing in is intolerable. it is almost as loud as the spoken word. wtf?
how did this get a pass?

the narration itself is also just ok. barely.

overall 1 star to narration. mostly due to the breathing

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Mediocre book

I really hate the minimum word count requirements for audible reviews. . . . . .

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Not bad, but it also didn't stand out for me.

So, I am getting to the point where I am probably 20-30 lit-RPG series deep. This one is fine, I thought it had some decent characters and banter but what it really didn't do for me was draw me and and make itself stand out. This book is sort of like a slightly advanced MMO of what we currently have. Lots of the mechanics and concepts were things that felt right out of a current MMO with dive technology and advanced AI characters.

Really, it just didn't stand out to me as being something special. It was fine, but really I don't think I would listen to it a second time or get a sequel.

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OMG!!

Buy this book now!! If you enjoy litrpg in anyway, you will love love LOVE this book. I have not read any litrpg like this one and it is amazing! I cant wait to get the next one.

*I requested this book and am voluntarily leaving this review

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Great read and a big step Forward for the Genre!!!

Wow - what a great addition to the Lit-RPG genre! This is a great book not matter your familiarity with video games - Role Playing Games- or their presence in fiction.

I loved this book, the characters are unique and dynamic, the plot is interesting and coherent, and the story is just plain fun. The author perfectly captures the excitement that a gamer feels while playing these games and makes that excitement available to the reader without getting bogged down in the minutia of stat pages, skill trees, and other staples of an RPG, while still connecting to those aspects of the games.

I would recommend this book to anybody looking for a quality read. I anxiously await the next installment.

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I made it to the end...

Which means this book is well edited, narrated adequately, and isn’t impregnated with the all-too-common, festering boil on the ass of LitRPG and fantasy titles on Audible... (for those not in the know), that’s the 13 year-old male, masturbatory fantasies inartistically and repeatedly rammed into the plot...

forgive the pun. Much like the authors I’m referring to I just couldn’t help myself.

It’s a testament to the state of the genre on Audible that merely meeting the three criteria above pretty much automatically guarantees a minimum 3 star rating from me.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of other problems that I had to overlook in order to get all the way through it.

In spite of the 3 star review I can’t say this is a “good” LitRPG book, it was just well executed in terms of basic technical writing quality and performance. Otherwise I can’t really recommend it unless your wishlist is bone-dry.

First, nothing (plot-wise) happens for about the first 10-11 hours. While there are a couple of “Interludes” that lay a little bit of the base of the story down, in terms of story progression or character development, NOTHING HAPPENS!

I won’t go through all the unnecessary things that the author tells us prior to the point where a story is actually begun. If I just start at the point where there is an actual plot, I can say that the book would be a typically average and inoffensive, middle of the road, Player collaborating with an AI, LitRPG book.

Sadly, even in the last few hours where the story begins to create some momentum, there are all kinds of holes in the story-logic and then the narrator chooses this point to become more hammy and melodramatic. In his defense though, he was probably just so bored of the book up to that point that he couldn’t help but get over-excited at the opportunity to do more than directly relate game mechanics and deliver “then they did this” narrative.

Finally, this author spends less time with any visual or sensory description than a trigonometry text book. I’m not saying I wanted him to wax poetic about the beauty of the sunrise or myopically describe the intricacies of a sword hilt, but common... We’re lucky if he tells us what time of day it is and whether the characters are inside or outside.

So all in all, in spite of the three stars I can’t say I’d recommend this, unless you’re like me and have listened to every single GameLit title on Audible that doesn’t include a harem, prose and editing a hamster would criticize, sex scenes as told by adult virgins imagining how great it would if the opposite sex wasn’t made temporarily impotent by a mere glance at them, or god-effing-forbid.... narrated by the true ruiner of every audiobook he touches: Mathew “the Anti-Narrator” Broadhead...

...seriously, anything but that.

On the other hand, if you are like me and just can’t face trying (again) to make it past the first 30 minutes of anything written by Schinhoffen, D. Davis, or Cipriano, or any other audiobook whose cover art features a minimum 2:1 ratio of semi-exposed breasts to pectoral muscles, then this is not the worst title to spend the credit on.... At least it didn’t make me truly angry that I spent time listening to it.

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