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. 

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/

Hunger Games for the unexamined life

A tad gross and bro-y but I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Once I passed the info-dump it moved quickly.  I liked it enough for a sequel, maybe a trilogy, but SEVEN books? Nope.