Earl was a salesman living in a post-WWIII Earth. All work was done by AI controlled robots, allowing people to do whatever they wanted, which was the problem. Apathy was the prevailing attitude now and no one was motivated to do anything. Earl was hoping that the new MMO coming out, Olympus Online, would provide a distraction. Earl was right - entering Olympus Online was better than anything else he had ever experienced. Bur from the start, it seemed that was another agenda at work. What had he stumbled into?
My Opinion: 223 pages, $2.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
A fairly good LitRPG story with a greek god theme. The beginning of the story describes a future world where most jobs are taken by A.I. and robots. It’s well described and the speculation is believable, serves as a reasonable excuse why the main character (MC) would agree to spend 6 months in a full immersion game he has little information about. Ultimately none of the real world stuff matters since the main character (MC) never returns there and that world is never mentioned again after the 13% mark. Once in the game it’s a slice of life action adventure story with some minor survivalist aspect that disappear when he meets people. Lots of well described action and quests from gods, but not much else.
On the game mechanic side of things it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The described game mechanics eventually become an important part of the story but initially they’re left out for a sense of realism. I feel like the story shifted from something more like portal fiction to the full immersion game setting. This is indicated by the shift in the story from an inferred permadeath system with the MC being told ‘he’ll only have one life’ in the game to an actual respawn system once he gets there. Though even then the MC only dies once in the story so it doesn’t get much use. Another issue with the game mechanics is that the stats shown don’t really matter to the story. The MC having 0 intelligence doesn’t impede him nor does him going from stats of 1 to 30 have any impact on the story since there are no damage notifications for the MC during combat. Other than that, most of the game stuff makes sense with the MC being a barbarian and having a rage meter and stamina and health mattering to the story. Lots of item descriptions which again don’t really impact the story, but the effort is made to keep them regular.
Overall, once I accepted the stats wouldn’t matter, I enjoyed the slice of life action. I could have probably done without a full character sheet every chapter, but I liked the greek theme and the setup for series villains.
Score: 7.2 out of 10