This ain't your daddy's tower defense!
Popper, Jonah, Gretchen, and Alice are back! The Hobgoblin Riot, Dominion of Blades, Book 2. A litrpg adventure.
CLUSTERF*CK
clus·ter·f*ck
ˈklə-stər-ˌfək
vulgar slang. Noun.
1) A disastrously and utterly mishandled situation or undertaking.
2) Popper’s scouting mission to Castellane.
It was supposed to be a simple scouting mission. In and out. No fighting. No new quests. Just me, my hippocorn Alice, and a few hired mercenaries. We were going to tiptoe into the Spiral, get the info we needed, and leave. You know, the Spiral? That tower defense run that protects the hobgoblin capital from invaders?
Easy, right? Nobody would even know we were there.
Yeah, so about that…
My Opinion: 587 pages, $3.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
Even though it’s a pretty massive book at 587 pages, it all goes by pretty quickly. A sign of an engaging story. The narrative structure of the story has changed from book 1. This time it’s told from multiple perspectives as the team breaks up and goes on their own quests. Each chapter is a ‘note’ from someone in the group or something recovered as a historical document. It’s a neat way to change points of view or add out of the game events to the story.
The novel has all the humor, banter, and cursing you’d likely come to enjoy from book 1. The story has greatly improved in feeling less forced. I think part of this is due to the fact that all the setup for the series is done. Character backgrounds are setup. The larger issues with the game world are setup. So the author can just send his characters on fun, crazy, interesting adventures. There are still lots of twists to the story and quests. The author is very fond of those. But there is better setup and foreshadowing, so those twists don’t feel as forced for the most part.
On the game mechanic side, there’s less focus on individual leveling or leveling up skills and more on the larger game play mechanics, the tower defense aspect. It’s fun and incorporates resource management with action battles.
Overall, the novel has all the things I liked about book 1 and almost none of the things I didn’t. It was a hard story to put down and I found myself laughing out loud many times. The story almost gets an 8 but some of the tower defense stuff gets a little repetitive and the last boss fight ending was just too wand wavy.
Score: 7 out of 10.
The Hobgoblin Riot: Dominion of Blades Book 2: A LitRPG Adventure