A story of how human world / earth is turns into an rpg game, with stats, loot boxes, rng(esus), 
With viewer, favourites, and patrons 
You get the idea.

This book had me laughing in all the right ways! The audio was amazing and I would recommend listening to this book 100%

Two star reviews are reserved for books that were so bad I did not finish, but had something enjoyable about them. This gets 2.5 because I finished it.

So I want to start by saying this is not a good book, and I would never recommend someone else read it. That being said, the good things about this book are that the action is fun, the characters are sometimes tolerable, and the author does a great job at two things: setting up seemingly impossible problems that the characters solve in interesting ways, and really getting a reader curious about what's going to happen next. This last one is somewhat clumsy and heavy handed, but it is very effective, so credit where credit is due.

This book is also incredibly racist and misogynistic. I'm pretty sure the author thinks most people in South America do not live or sleep in houses, either that or he thinks the continent is on the other side of the planet from North America. The book is full of gross sexist jokes, oftentimes in places and situations where they make no sense. The main character is practically sexless in the ways he responds to conversations about sex or sexuality, but the world around him is disturbingly horny, with the narrative pausing occasionally to breathlessly describe the details of an alien woman's gigantic boobs.

Also I'm pretty sure the author thinks the MC is a good person, but he chose to rob a group of people (racialized and otherized) who just helped him, then kill their leader. He accidently kills all their kids when he does this. How does this make him feel? Just kinda bad! Like a bit of a jerk! And how dare they make him feel bad about it (his words not mine.)

I use this detail to illustrate how incredibly bad at character writing the author is, at least in this first book. He really wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to write a fun and fast paced sleazy trashy adventure book, which he's pretty good at doing! But he also wants his characters to be complex and deep, he wants them to make hard and complicated choices and deal with the consequences both internally and externally, he wants to satirize our world and say something deep and meaningful about it, and at all these things he is an absolute failure. Also his worldbuilding is terrible. What a waste of an intergalactic society.

All in all I will not ever recommend this book, and will actively discourage others from reading it.

This was an incredibly fast and fun read. Nothing crazy to challenge yourself with. I initially found it to be a fluffy read, and the prose was nothing to write home about (wakka wakka), especially with typos and some awkward sentences. But I will state that I was completely caught by surprise when by the end of the book I did genuinely care about the safety and well-being of the main characters. Dinneman just snuck right up behind me and got me completely invested in the doings of Carl and Princess Donut.

A fun read, I really enjoyed the litRPG genre. I have to admit that the dudebro teen humor was a bit hit-or-miss—while entertaining initially, it became tiresome as the story progressed (I found myself frequently eye-rolling). As someone who has been playing RPGs/TTRPGs for over 15 years, I felt the narration fell short at times. I also never became invested in Carl as a character, not even at the end of the book, when I felt the story as a whole became more interesting - I even found him tiresome at points.

Nonetheless, I LOVED Princess Donut and take it from someone who struggles to concentrate while listening to audiobooks: this audiobook is a must-listen; Jeff Hays' hilarious narration saved me from DNFing it a couple of times.

Overall, it was a fun read, and, while the humor may not always land, I plan to continue with the series as a light break from my other readings.

'Dungeon Crawler Carl' by Matt Dinniman is a fun, urban fantasy that follows one man and his cat when they get pulled into an alien competition. 
When aliens invade and pit the surviving humans against each other in a televised dungeon battle, Carl is paired up with his ex-girlfriends cat, Princess Donut. Now with the ability to speak, Princess Donut and Carl will have to battle against hordes of enemies, brutal humans, and the system itself to get further into the dungeon and a chance at survival. 
Dungeon Crawler Carl is a lot of fun. Carl is a character that is easy to care about paired with one of my favorite cats in fiction. Princess Donut is hilarious and she adds a lot to the humor in the series. Outside of the humor, Carl is a deeply caring person who gets himself in trouble because he wants to genuinely help the people that he encounters. He is a good placeholder for the reader as he is learning about the weird alien game he is living within right alongside the reader. This world is populated with interesting creatures, horrifying personalities, and new twists and turns around each corner. This is a great start to a series that I will definitely be continuing with. There are some solid mysteries about the world that are set up in this volume and I also cannot wait to spend more time with Carl and Donut. 

The writing style isn’t my favorite, but I DNFd because I felt like the story and characters weren’t progressing. The main characters were just checking boxes along the way. 

LitRPGs are my guilty pleasure, and this is definitely one I'd put towards the top of the list. Even though it still had the trappings of an RPG game system, I really liked that the book didn't focus overly on stats or leaderboards or other things that can get stale and tiresome, and the system was built into the story in a way that made sense and didn't feel too forced. I also liked that the main character stuck to his own morals and priorities and didn't just fall headfirst into trying to play into the system. It definitely helped that (unlike some entries in the genre) Carl wasn't given any sort of fancy item that really gave him a head-start from the beginning, and most of their victories came out of preparation or on-the-spot ingenuity and problem-solving. 

The humor is pretty great, though it can be pretty low-brow. A lot of the funniest lines come from the (kind of dark, if you think about it too hard) system announcements and achievements. There are some moments where there's a more serious edge to what is truly a very dark situation, but this is not a book that makes you stew in that for too long without moving back into a more (darkly) humorous angle. 

All in all, I enjoyed the characters and the humor. This is not a super deep or heavy book, even though it deals with some pretty dark topics and situations. I will probably pick up the next one once I've finished out my Fantasy bingo card for the year.