As the last nuclear weapon is dismantled, the earth celebrates. World peace has been achieved, and the future looks bright. Fittingly, a meteor shower marks the event and people gather the world over to watch it. Neighbours with neighbours, friends with friends, family with family.
And then a darkness falls over the Earth, and everyone falls into a coma. Planes drop from the skies. Buses crash. Life support machines fail.
Those who wake up find that three days have gone by, and the people around them have vanished. Where have they been taken? What has happened to them? Why were they left behind? The survivors band together and try to figure it out, all the while surviving in a world where the power is gone.
And then some of the missing people return, but it isn’t them. They aren’t people anymore. They act like it, but something is inside of them just waiting to come out. Nobody can be trusted.
My Opinion: 160 pages, $2.99, available on Kindle Unlimited
One day meteors fall from the sky and everyone loses consciousness. A group of people wake up and find that it’s their duty to find some monoliths and destroy them or some aliens are going to come kill everyone. Everyone else they meet are infected with some strange, never really explained, condition that turns them into raging killers. Oh...and everyone has levels, classes, and abilities and they might live in a game world but that’s never really explained.
This feels like a recycled story that someone adapted to be LitRPGish. There are game mechanics in the story, levels, abilities, powers, but they almost feel incidental. There’s some vague reference to everyone being in a game but that’s never really explained. For example, one of the main characters is a hardened detective that’s thrown away her marriage and family to chase after a serial killer and she also happens to be a level 24 detective with a 3rd eye ability.
The story feels like a end of the world, apocalyptic, supernatural mystery with just enough gaming elements thrown in to qualify as LitRPG. The survival apocalypse elements of the story are done well. The characters are well fleshed out. The only other thing on Amazon that I could find that the author has written is an apocalypse thriller.
I just didn’t enjoy the story. Not because it was poorly written, but because it felt like a mashup of so many other things that it never really did any of them well, especially the LitRPG part.
Score: 4 out of 10.
Game Over (LitRPG Series Book 1)