Lord Kadorax Darkarrow was born on Earth, but in Agglor, he’s the highest-level assassin anyone can find. The leader of the famed Blackened Blades, he’s made a name for himself, built a kingdom of sorts, and only had to respawn once along the way.
Then a rogue band of jackals sends him all the way back to a dreary tavern in a tiny village to start over at level one.
Hellbent on revenge, Kadorax sets out on a path littered with bodies—level up, find the jackals, slay their god!
My Opinion: 282 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
This is a decent enough action story, but there’s not much else to it. The RPG game mechanics exists and while there’s some originality with the specific stats and class the main character Kadorax chooses, it’s not as interesting as I’d hope it would be. It really amounts to the MC fighting, doing some slice of life adventuring, and picking new powers (that are kind of boring) as he levels.
What made the story hard for me to invest in is that I had a hard time connecting to any of the characters. Take the MC for example. We’re introduced to him when he’s already powerful and even though he starts over at level 1, he’s still existed in the game world for decades. However, we only get small amounts of background info and history on him as the story goes on but not enough for me to really care about him.
The story tries to build around the beginning action scene but meanders a bit and instead becomes slice of life. There’s an attempt to build tension but it’s difficult because there are no consequences for anyone's actions, good or bad. Not really anyways. To either the earth born players or the natives, the worst that can happen is that they’re killed and respawn in some randomly chosen location back at level one. They retain all the memories of their existence in the game world, their appearance doesn’t even change, and with minimal effort can even re-establish all their old connections if they want. Any bad deeds you did (murder, theft, etc.) seems to be forgiven and character stat consequences are gone after respawn. It made me feel like nothing really mattered in the story.
Overall, while nothing in the writing was bad, I just didn’t connect with the characters and the RPG world just wasn’t interesting enough on it’s own to engage me.
Score: 6 out of 10.