Richard 'Wolf' Mikall was a member of the US Special forces. The key term is 'was'. When his last mission to stop and destroy a new type of weapon goes awry he finds himself in a new world. Forced into a new world reminiscent of a video game he often played with his team, he must decide what he will do. Gods, factions, an Empire hunting him. Who, why, where, and how he decides to fight will determine his fate while the scars of the past continue to plague him.
My Opinion: 315 pages, $2.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Ok. Right off the bat, this story just doesn’t know what it wants to be and that becomes very boring. The game mechanics are detailed but later you can tell the author decided to change them.
Overall, those things just made the story unentertaining for me and I lost interest. For more specific details continue to read.
**Spoilers Ahead**
The first 8% of this novel is almost future military fiction with the main character (MC) fighting in a far flung future where the US is at war with China for the 2nd time. It doesn’t have any RPG stuff. Even if the author was trying to let it serve as backstory, it genuinely doesn’t matter since it turns into portal fiction LitRPG when the MC, Wolf, is transported to a new world because of some weapon and he never returns to our world.
At the 9% mark, the MC is in this character creation plane where he has to make an avatar to enter this new world that has RPG mechanics. Till the 17% mark, this is a survivalist story where the MC is figuring out how the world and the game mechanics in the world work. He’s also crafting tools, making shelter, fighting beasts in the forest for XP, trapping.
At the 17% point, it shifts into this quest to stop slavers from taking a town. The MC kills the entire army in this Rambo style, gorilla tactics, battle.
At the 23% mark it shifts again to helping a 50,000 year old woman reconnect with her people and some vague quest to get her to a temple.
At the 38% mark, the author suddenly retcons the story and introduces gods claiming they brought the MC to the world.
At the 54% mark, out of the blue, the author completely abandons that entire storyline and just seems to want to start over and the MC gets branded a traitor, murderer, and spy then kicked out of the village he saved. From there it’s just him killing things.
Near the end of the story the author even seems to abandon the MCs perspective and shifts to other character’s point of views, introducing new characters right before the story ends.
As far as the game mechanics go, for the most part they’re detailed. But they change as the author realizes that he’d limited himself with how they were originally setup. At the beginning of the story it’s very clearly stated that the only way to improve stats or skills was through use of stat points and skill points that are gained by leveling. Then later (at the 30% and 50% mark), the author introduces ‘Progressive’ skills/magic that improve with use and ‘Conditioning’ which lets stats be improved with training suddenly. Not a big thing really but it again reflects that this story just went its own way, even if that way contradicts what happened previously.
Overall, the story just didn’t know what it wanted to be and I got bored with it when the author abandoned the only big quest in the story. I still finished it but it was a slog.
Score: 5 out of 10