When Martin's raiding guild join the latest virtual reality MMO, they discover a challenge like no other. Strata Online is a hundred floor mega-dungeon, filled with an ever-shifting ecosystem of monsters.
Martin's team soon find themselves in a race against the world’s strongest guilds, all competing to be the first to reach the unbeatable game's lowest depths. Stranger still, they must now contend with Sin, a twisted morality meter which can transform a players’ class into its dark counterpart.
With eternal fame and prizes on the line, Martin risks playing as a rarely chosen race; a Murovan rat-man, combined with the unusual exorcist class.
But unlike other games, he will need as much courage as skill to progress. Because the deeper he goes, the darker Strata gets.
My Opinion: 368 pages, $4.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is a solid VR dungeon crawl story that has a thread of Old One type horror that might be developed more in future books. There's good action, decent RPG progression, a good amount of notifications and other crunchy stuff, and good group banter after about 38% when players joined the main character’s group. Evern the drudgery of the IRL job was a nice counterpoint to the excitement of the game. I also liked that the races in the game were non-human, it added a little flare to the story.
Score: 7.7 out of 10