The book was OK, its not so bad that I would return it or anything like that. I bought the book based on all of the good reviews and because I loved Infinite and Mirror World wasn’t too shabby either. Infinite I will likely listen to again which is how I judge a really good book. If its good enough to refresh the story in your mind or to just try and pick up new parts and tidbits. The previously mentioned books had a twist at the end and many reviews for this book mentioned a twist which helped to keep me listening. I was waiting for something big and crazy or unexpected. Instead there is more of what I would call a teaser for a second book at the end. Like the very end, maybe 5 minutes before the book was over. I also didn’t really care for the female narrator. The delivery was flat, dry and something just wasn’t there. The male narrator seemed to be spot on for the role and performed the voices well.
One other thing or I guess you could say two things that really bothered me throughout the book were Choat & Dongle. First off its Choad, I don’t know if the author wrote it incorrectly or if the narrator mispronounced the word. Second word is maybe supposed to be Donger? Dong? not Dongle. A dongle is generally a device that you insert into a computer port as a means of security for example. So that got annoying pretty quickly hearing that over and over and words like “TOTES”. Just because this guy plays video games doesn’t mean hes going to talk like a totally tubular 90’s surfer rad dude, or a 13 yr old valley girl.
The lowbrow humor didn’t bother me, I’ve listened to Critical Failures and laughed my butt off at some of the potty humor in those books. Even with the story falling off over the last few books I would still say if that is your flavor of humor then you will certainly laugh much hard from those books. Or my other current favorite LitRPG series that has very similar humor (Except some rated R parts that sometimes go a bit too far so NSFW x10) would be the Everybody Loves Large Chests series. Those books had me in tears at times. Thinking back on this book I think I maybe laughed at one part, maybe…
**Spoilers from here**
How did the people from other countries get there? Did I just miss that entire part?
Why was the aliens true goals never reveled, it was kind of assumed and hinted to by the guy that was kidnapped by the aliens but this could have been expanded on so much more.
More dialog from the alien side would have been nice as well, even if it was a kidnapped alien or set of aliens being questioned.
I thought when the first alien that was naked a scared by his own body ran away that this was going to be expanded on and worked into the story so much more than (the hate their own bodies). I mean it could have been that the aliens actually looks like humans or humanish but when teleporting to a new world they are randomly generated as a body part of the host species, or maybe there was a glitch and they know what they look like and are freaking out if they realize. I could throw some other ideas out there that still seem better than what was there but the story had a lot of other problems like that one so it would have been a complete rewrite to fix every issue with this book and make it more intriguing without trying to use cheap tricks to keep the listeners engaged,