I have to assume the positive reviews come from children. This is one of the worst books I’ve ever read. To summarize:
* Atrocious prose littered with grammar mistakes, unrealistic dialogue, immersion-breaking references, tell-don’t-show info dumps, and all sorts of edgy and cliche one liners
* A protagonist who is supposedly some sort of genius god gamer who is handed a ludicrously OP character, then proceeds to make every mistake imaginable (and some I couldn’t imagine) and misses obvious details at every possible opportunity
* Random fixation on details that are unimportant and worthless (runecrafting, the twins)
* A complete lack of understanding of how legal proceedings work, along with a complete lack of understanding of how software architecture works. The author was apparently a software developer before writing this. I am a professional software engineer, and NEO has such mind bogglingly bad design that I can’t adequately describe how wrong it is. No way to query ANY data in any capacity is the biggest one.
* Pretty blatant sexism, racism, and homophobia. Main female love interest only exists to be objectified beyond a certain point in the story and gets a gratuitous amount of description, along with pretty much every other female character. Also, it’s not gay to thank your friend if he’s LITERALLY SAVING YOUR LIFE.
I had to DNF this book a few hours from the end when an hour long torture scene showed up following the dumbest series of decisions I’ve ever seen in any piece of non-satirical fiction. The book feels like it was written by either a middle schooler or (in reality) a neckbeard with some sort of goblin fetish. Do not waste your time and hurt yourself like I did.
I can’t comment on Jeff Hays since he was handed something that was borderline unreadable and had a terrible filter put over his voice half the time.