The voice acting is brilliant, especially Chester. The author does a great job making Chester funny and adorkable but the rest is eh. Lots of “tell don’t show” and a lot of time talking about percentages when we don’t care about the numbers because they don’t matter.
The team gets teleported into a place where they are the strongest people around, so there’s never any particular concern about them losing a fight. There are some fascinating social politics and opportunity set up that get most ignored.
The plot is forced and a bit scattered. They are dealing with politics… no, wait, there’s a monster invasion… no, wait, there’s an attacking army… oh, and the guy they are looking for runs the army! no, wait, he’s not there, just his kids. Well, time to become the villains! Let’s torture a guy for information on his father, then murder him right in front of his father over magical FaceTime, then promise Dad that we’re going to murder all his other kids, then talk about how good it felt to do all that and express no remorse. I dunno, maybe I’m old-fashioned but I like it when my heroes are, y’know, heroes? The good guys? Sure, moral grayness can be excellent and writing a conflict between different factions of bad guys (or morally gray guys) can be fun, but it’s a big tone shift right at the end of the book.
I guess the key thing is that I listened to the last third of the book on 1.5x and then 2x because I didn’t care anymore but I hate not finishing a book.