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.

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 loved this book! contains just enough earth pop culture references to not be insufferable like Ready Player One, but is more grounded than the whimsy of hitchhiker's guide (which I loved, don't get me wrong). love the (mild) gore, satire, and crude humor. 

the game mechanics (loot boxes, leveling, stat points, etc.) got a smidge tedious—though its clear Dinniman tries to cut out down the unimportant details once readers have adjusted to premise—as well as the xp farming bits, but it's clear from the beginning that the first three levels are TRAINING. I disagree with the people grouching that the story is moving too slow because book 1 progresses through only two levels: if the levels moved any faster, y'all would've complained Carl was OP and the pace was unrealistic. once they get to level three and choose race/class, things will (hopefully) expand beyond defaulting to familiar tactics (explosives and magic missiles), and we'll get to see more inventive boss fights. it's clear that there are overarching political agendas at play, both inside and outside of the dungeon, and there are a number of complex characters that I'm invested in. 

if I had to critique something besides the repetition, it'd be Odette's obscenely massive breast armor? I get that it's high-level gear, but with the loot boxes being somewhat tailored to the crawler, I want an explanation as to how and why she ended up with the appearance she's famous for when (if?) we get the backstory on her crawl. as for the rest of the female nudity, I'm not necessarily mad about it... yet. bodies are bodies, and there's nothing wrong with describing them, and right now, Dinniman's grotesque depictions lean more into body horror than sexualization. BUT! that could change. the only other nit-picky thing I have is Donut's Second Chance spell, which is originally described as being able to raise a monster of a lower level than the caster from the dead (Chap. 30, p. 257). In Chapter 45, Carl describes that Donut "could now apparently resurrect monsters up to five levels higher than herself" (396). The word "apparently" makes me think that there's some explanation for this, but for now it's an inconsistency.

can't wait to read the next book! long live science fiction!

It was surprisingly hard for me to get into this at first, but once the action started rolling, I was into it. I'm looking forward to the next installment!