Alvin woke in a room that was not his, to discover that he had died and his brain had been bargained off cheaply to pay off someone else’s debt. It did not sit well with him. It didn’t surprise him that even in death, people were still using him for their own purposes. He had never exactly been a good guy, but everyone had their breaking point, and he had found his.
The bastards in charge had uploaded his mind into a virtual death game. The whole world could now pay to see him play it and probably die. Alvin questioned whether he was really a bad guy, if this is how they wanted to treat him. Regardless, he was not about to wait for death to come for him. He would kick open the damn Apocalypse Gates and see about crushing everything that challenged him. It was time to make the world aware that he was done with pretending to be nice.
Welcome to Apocalypse Gates!
(This book contains adult themes. Including; gore, death, drug use, and graphic sex. GRAPHIC SEX! I don’t want you saying you weren’t warned here, this book has descriptive sex scenes… got it? Good!)
My Opinion: 384 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure: The author gave me an advance copy for review. I purchased both versions of the novel when they were relesead.
*Warning: The Author’s Cut version of the story has several sex scenes that are rather graphic. These scenes do not exist in the PG16 version but all the rest of the cursing and some sex references do.*
The first 30% of the novel is my favorite section. Here you get an almost episodic experience with the zombie apocalypse as the main character (MC) goes on a variety of missions. Some are about killing zombies, others about surviving for a set period, others still are about saving people from the zombie horde in different scenarios. There’s a nice variety of missions that keeps things interesting.
Once the world mode opens up, about the 30% mark, the story begins to feel more like a more traditional zombie apocalypse story. Except the MC gets XP for killing zombies and he can use that XP to upgrade himself, his weapons, and a variety of other things later.
Most of the story focuses on the MC trying to create a safe place in this world for people to resettle. There are town building game mechanics that come into play, resource management stuff. Like any good zombie apocalypse story, the tension in the story comes from the threat of monsters attacking as people salvage and also from internal drama from the group of survivors.
One of the few things I would have liked to have seen in the story is a greater variety of survivors. Especially in the mid part of the story, it felt like character recycling a little.
Over all though, it’s a good story that I finished in a single sitting. I’m looking forward to seeing where the story goes in book 2.
Score: 7 out of 10.
Rapture (Apocalypse Gates Author's Cut Book 1)