First, know that there are two things I feel the need to cover here: The story and the audio. The story is mostly fun, but pretty stupid. The audio production may well have been the best I’ve come across.
The setting is post-Singularity New York City, so the author can wave away questions like ‘How does a game seemingly have thousands of independent AI personalities?” or “What kind of processor or storage media do they use for this?” Not that it’s a bad thing. It’s necessary for the genre, but it’s also something I think the author leans on too much, to the extent that he might soon reach the point where it’s just declared ‘magic’. Personally, I prefer my SF to be Hard.
So anyway, the story is kinda stupid, which can still still be fun. Heck, I love some LitRPG series, which can be a lot of fun to read, even if I worry about being ‘judged’ for being seen reading them. I appreciated the lack of sex scenes — yes, it’s pretty solidly PG or PG-13 — and that the protagonist doesn’t stay as stupid as he seems to be at the beginning.
The audio, though, is far, far better than I expected, even after reading some reviews before I listened to it. They have a man to do the male voices and a woman to the female voices — Jeff Hays, Annie Ellicott — who each do a pretty good job, with different accents, etc. for each character. There is background and theme music and sometimes sound effects. There are original songs for some scenes. Some aren’t especially good songs — which actually makes sense story-wise, so that’s not really a negative. (E.g. Do you expect a song make up on the spot to lure in a bear cub to be a top 10 pop chart song?) And it doesn’t mess with comprehensibility! (Seriously, you wouldn’t expect background music to be mixed so it makes the narration hard to hear, but it absolutely happens… just not here.)
So anyway, fun book, but don’t expect literature. Do expect a great audio experience.