Life can be good when your enemies think you're dead.
But Wynne has traded one set of foes for another, and a hunter in oldtech armor wants him for sinister purposes.
Neither fully man or machine, it's up to this new bunker core to rise up against all odds, using his wits and technology to prevail against twisted animal-folk, shining mutants, and threats literally from out of this world...
My Opinion: 281 pages, $4.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
It was a lot harder to get into this story for me. Even though it's a book 2, it's also a reset. In book 1 the story was more traditionally a dungeon core story with enemies attacking a base that had traps and was upgraded and defended by a core and its AI assistant. Book 2 loses a good bit of that. The original dungeon is gone, the big enemy is off to the side, and a really big loss for me, even if temporary, was the loss of the AI companion in the early story. It seems silly but the conversations that the MC had with it in book 1 were funny and broke up the internal dialogue of the core. It made it harder to get through the first half of the novel.
Also there's less focus on the expected dungeon core stuff: base building, traps, and fending off waves of enemies. Instead there's more exploration as the dungeon core becomes more mobile and the tribe he's with try to make a new place to live while dealing with local enemies. Because I wasn't really invested in that tribe, it made what they were doing less interesting. It's really not till mid story that you even get a good antagonist either.
On the game mechanic side of things it's mixed. There's nothing wrong here as all the upgrade mechanics from book 1 carry over. But they feel less impactful, especially in the first half of the story. I mean, I get that inventory and mobility upgrades are important but they were frankly not exciting. Not like the murder traps I was used to seeing in dungeon core stories.
Overall, though the writing was solid and things got a bit more exciting mid and late story, it was just too hard to stay interested in the novel. I think if you've read book 1 more recently or don't mind the loss of certain elements from book 1, you may like this more.
Score: 6 out of 10