Can a disease infect a virtual world?
Jupiter finally got his hands on the newest immersive virtual reality system, and he’s logging into Yevelia along with his best friend, Cas. Yevelia has everything he wanted; magic, monsters, and a chance to level up. Everything he doesn’t have offline.
But there’s something odd about the first quest, and the NPC’s. And why did the developers include a plague that is slowly spreading across the game?
Something’s wrong with Yevelia, and the AI seems determined to use Jupiter to right the wrong.
A fast paced litRPG set in The Hub World.
My Opinion: 81 pages, $0.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Full Disclosure: I received an advanced copy for review. I purchased a copy when it became available.
This is a short story in a planned serial and overall it is just shy of good for me.
The introduction to the main characters (MC) is well done and the banter between the protagonists is nice and snarky. The game world is described well enough that you can tell that the author is a gamer. There’s a decent amount of RPG details. The reader is shown character sheets, stats, HP, Mana, there is ability and skill advancement as the characters level. World game mechanics also felt pretty solid.
Combat, is a good bit of the questing in the story but is only ok. It felt a little lackluster.
The thing that lost me were the cyber thriller elements introduced in the end of the story. They made the game mechanics feel unimportant and honestly unapplied. It’s one of those things where I suspect, had damage numbers or mana or stamina costs been shown the story would have fallen apart a bit. This is mostly because the big villian just doesn’t follow the rules of the game so overcoming that requires a certain level of ignoring or conveniently not showing info.
Otherwise, a decent story. Interesting characters, good banter between them, decent combat descriptions, ok game mechanic descriptions. Do plan to read the 2nd story in the series when it comes out. If you like cyberthriller elements more than I do, you’ll probably like the story more.
Score: 6 out of 10