Brett Hayes never expected his life to amount to much. He escaped Boston, with help from his mother, to head to the west coast and create a new life in Seattle. All that changes when he attends a party to celebrate his friend's new physics invention: a device that connects two universes together.
Events quickly spiral out of control as Brett, and his best friend's ex-girlfriend, find themselves pulled by the device and end up in a different version of Earth, one that has been stripped of it's resources and population by an alien race. Will the Earth they came from share a similar fate? Can they escape the dimension they've been sent to and find a way back home? And do they want to escape after learning more about the universe they find themselves in? More importantly, can they change the SyStem that controls everything in that universe and many more?
The SyStem: Multiverse is the first book in a series of the same name, where they fight monsters with psychic powers, deal with betrayal, survive on a barren world, and decide whether they will let things remain the same or take action to change their circumstances.
Jon Svenson is the author of Biomedical Self-Engineering and other novels yet to be released.
This books contains oodles of action and adventure, but has no profanity and no intimate scenes or harems. Just so you know.
My Opinion: 430 pages, $5.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
Full disclosure: I received an advanced copy for review. I purchased a copy when it became available.
This is a slice of life sci-fi LitRPG story. It features two protagonists that are kidnapped and taken to an alternate dimension. The two must use that universe’s RPG System to grow powerful enough to escape their captors and find some way to get home or destroy the system that's giving them their power. It's really just following the two as they go through this universe, travel through space, gain skills with a sci-fi theme, fight, and survive. While there's some decent action and interesting betrayals that kept the story moving forward, it often felt like the main characters were stumbling through it all and not really making their own decisions but were being pushed around by other forces.
The game stuff is not particularly complex with skills and levels being gained for just about everything whether its completing quests or learning how to fly a spaceship. There are lots of notifications and quests and the RPG system is baked into the story world. But beyond the limitation of only having a certain number of skills equipped at one time, there's not a whole lot on the game mechanic side that's new. The story is very skill focused.
Overall, it's a decent read. I was entertained enough by the betrayals and the sci-fi universe to follow the characters through their adventures. But a lack of any clear goals or really bad antagonists left me wanting a little.
Score: 7.1 out of 10