Winter is coming, is it? Well, if my shrivelled-up little energy bar is anything to go by, I’d argue that it's already f***ing here.
Trust me, the infinite lives hack seemed like a good idea at the time.
Welcome to Infinitus, an exciting new MMORPG where you can make friends and mutilate people, without the complications that often arise from the latter. If you fancy having your digitized soul stuffed into a Wizard, an Elf, or one of any number of fantasy bodies, then this is the fully immersive gaming experience for you. Magic, melees, and if you play your cards right, adventurer-on-adventurer action await.
Or at least, that’s what the sons of glitches on the commercial promised me.
What I got was the Lord of the Rings on bloody amphetamines. A glitching garbage-fire of a game. As I write this, I’m trapped in a Red Zone, with a horde of unstoppable murder fiends, a clingy nemesis, and a pack of players who couldn’t give two tugs of a Donkey Kong’s you-know-what whether I live or die. The wrong end of my flaming sword keeps catching fire. The only NPCs who want to have sex with me are members of the Gnome community. And to make matters worse, I can’t log out.
Um, I did mention the tank full of heavily armed soldiers in mech suits who just arrived, right?
I am so screwed…
Warning: “Infinite lives” contains swearing, stats and violence, the FPS occupation of a fantasy MMORPG, a hung-over gamer girl in a mech suit, a chainsaw wielding Amazon, sleazy Zombies, an evil Necromancer, the most pointless artifact ever, characters with unbelievably inappropriate avatars, an ad-saturated cyberpunk future, an excessively violent horde, inappropriate workplace behaviour, a drunk Wizard with a ring fetish, weaponized Gnomes, non-PC NPCs, and possibly a melee et trois.
More swearing than Ready Player One. Less words than Lord of the Rings…
My Opinion: 295 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
This is a story that is filled with cursing, bravado, pop culture and geek gamer jokes. Parody and satire are big parts of the story. The humor landing will determine if you like this because there’s not much going on with the story beyond the humor. Like really, in the first 20% of the novel, the main character (MC) talks to a zombie, kills a goblin, and gets into a bar. That’s it. Yeah, there are other POVs shown and setups for lots of jokes, but in that space the MC mostly talks, jokes, and monologues. That’s what the story is, lots of humor mixed in with awkward situations, sub plots about rogue AI, hacking,gaming gone wrong, and a minor amount of fighting.
Overall, while I appreciated all the jokes, and some of the long game setups for some, the humor didn’t land with me. Which made the first part of the story kind of boring. Thankfully the mid story picked up the pacing a bit, but the story never got good for me because the humor didn’t land with me. This not a badly written story and I think if the humor lands with you, you’ll like it a lot more than I did.
Score: 6 out of 10