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.