The peer pressure finally got to me. Full disclosure: I am severely prejudiced against the LitRPG genre and I was looking forward to roasting this book. However, by the end, I found myself unable to hate it, and eager to see what happens next. I've been dungeon-pilled, you could say.

One thing I can't deny: this book is a lot of fun. Consistent action, imaginative humor and entertaining characters bring something exciting on every page. The nature of the story forces new things to consistently happen, and I was almost never bored while reading. Despite the repetitive grindy nature of the first few levels, enough was happening internally and with the greater story to keep me wondering, and kudos to the author for that.

However, I do have my qualms. The humor in this book is crass and juvenile in a distinctly gen-x way, and though I did actually find it quite funny 99% of the time, there are a few jokes that were decidedly Not Funny and pushed too far, a subtle line that I hope the author will tread with more care as the series goes on. 

And although it didn't make the book entirely unreadable (far from it, in fact), all my worst fears about the nature and quality of the writing came true. There's a kind of Scalzi-esque style-orver-substance shallowness that pervades the writing. Yes, the aliens are a satire of capitalist disdain for the masses, and the Dungeon Crawl is a metaphor for exploitative reality entertainment, and Carl is playing the part of the straight man who is disgusted by the evil in all this, but those elements are stupidly obvious and buried in a sea of junk. I can only read so many video game ui tooltips and listen to so many gameplay wiki articles recited by the tutorial guildmaster before I start to wonder if it's worth reading 4,000 pages of this, even if it is really funny. This book follows the Andy Weir school of "demonstrating just how hard the author has thought through every detail of this scenario" that causes so much pop sci-fi to suffer, in my opinion.

This book ended up giving me exclaxtly what I was expecting: a thrilling popcorn read, stuffed with jokes and entertainment value, delivered at (I am sorry to say this) a gamer-brainrot reading level. I am cautiosly eager to continue the series, the next time I'm looking for some head empty fun time. Who knows, it might surprise me.

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 is a fun, fast read that requires zero mental effort.  I like the main characters and really want them to succeed.

This is a standard LitRPG.  I like this subgenre and have read several series like this.  It's doing what it's doing well but it's not doing anything original with the LitRPG elements.

This book really wants to be funny and sometimes it's quite funny and sometimes it's not.  It's consistently trying too hard, though.

The book is intermittently cruel, i.e., the first main boss is an overweight woman with hoarding disorder who vomits bugs out of her mouth.  Do we really need to be making fun of mental illness at this point?  It doesn't sit well with the main character that she's a person from the real world, but that doesn't excuse the author's unnecessary exploitation of mental illness.  Being that this wasn't a critical part of the plot, it just comes across as unnecessary and unkind.  At several points there's these sorts of riffs on stereotypically negative portrayals of women that are excused by these characters being enemies.  Add onto this problematic pile of issues, the main character's cheating girlfriend and I start to get a little uncomfortable with the trend.

This book is over-hyped - I think a lot of the hype is that this is many people's first introduction to a LitRPG.  That said, I enjoyed reading this page-turner and I look forward to continuing the series.  I've heard the series gets better as it goes along and I hope that's true because there's a lot of potential here.

I HATED THIS BOOK!

I question if the author hates women? The misogyny was real. The references were absurd and offensive. Also I hate video games and I double hate books written like a video game (new hate unlocked) I definitely was not the target audience, the target audience would be the men incels who talk about hating women while simultaneously wondering why they can’t find a woman. This book was torture.

I only finished this because of book club, I like going to book club. Also the reason why I rated this a 2 star book was because the audiobook production was fantastic. I will not be continuing this series. 

I had a good laugh reading this, but I think the misogyny was juuuuuuust too much. Look, I can laugh at a joke like that if it’s delivered well and is surrounded by a different tone throughout the book. This book is not subtle. After the first bro joke it got old quick. Really fun concept, but I personally enjoyed “World Tree Online” better. 

This was supposed to be satirical and funny. I found it to be neither.

I found the characters to be lacking of any depth. I also found the writing and character depictions  to be hugely misogynistic, sexist, and slightly racist.

I wanted to finish this book to develop my thoughts on the entirety of this individual book, but recently discovered that the author likes to find reviews and make TT videos blasting reviewers for negative opinions. I found this to be disgusting and was the icing on the cake for me.

I will sadly never recommend this series and will be adding this author to my DNR list.

Entertaining? Yes. Easy and quick to read? Yes. Do I want to know what happens next? Yeah. Would I call this a good book, or even well-written? Hell nah.

Weird-ass teenage boy humour and misogynistic under- and mid-tones included.

If this is the best the LitRPG genre has to show, well, yikes.

Also, another reviewer here pointed out this:
 
So the author of Dungeon Crawler Carl (Matt Dinniman) likes to take bad reviews of his books and write them into future books while naming the reviewers handle. 

You can check the author's TikTok page if you want proof of this behaviour.

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZGdB7rACt/