Monsters are real. Magic works. Its a dry run for the apocalypse. Will you survive The Beta Test?
The wild places have become more and more dangerous as animals and plants have become altered. Some are larger, some exhibit strange powers but many are dangerous. Cody, a down on his luck veteran of the US Army, goes to the forest to die. He's going to earn an insurance payout for his family and maybe help protect some of the countless squatters forced from their homes when automation took their jobs. It will be a good death. That isn't quite the way things work out.
The artificial intelligence thinks it is operating a game. The players are the residents of the forest. They all undergo forced character creation and try to survive while learning their new powers. Cody is determined to break out of the test zone and builds a team that work closely together to survive the new game-like reality.
The NanoWielder Saga combines modern technology with emergent magic. Many normal animals are altered into super predators. The most dangerous monsters of all are the gamers.
Beta Test contains game elements. Both characters and monsters level up and gain new powers as they grow in experience. Some of the crew learn to create simple magic items and learn to use magical runes.
My Opinion: 225 pages, $3.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
There are a few issues that might turn off readers but if they don’t you’ll likely enjoy the good action and depth of the RPG system. However, the issues below were enough to just push the story to the point where it didn’t work for me. But plenty of other readers have enjoyed the story.
One of the early issues, for me, is that the early part of the story is a bit of an info dump and it takes too long to get to the actual story. About 14% before you finish the setup, the main character (MC) finishes his character creation, and you get to any action. There's also a bit about an AI secretly releasing nanites all over the world to create monsters and justify the RPG apocalypse thing.
The other part I actually disliked is the scene where a mother was transformed into a monster and she murders her husband and two young children. It didn't add anything to the story and was frankly off putting enough to make some readers stop reading. I think part of my issue is that the scenes where parents kill their children or children kill their parents are dark and that darkness isn’t carried through the other scenes in the story. It's the apocalypse, so a level of darkness is expected, but the level established by those deaths isn’t maintained throughout the story. The rest of the fights, while brutal and show the MC getting constantly hurt, don’t reflect the vileness I’d expect if this was a full blown dark story. Most of the people in the story are surprisingly good, don’t take advantage of others, and are even willing to risk their lives to help strangers.
There's certainly a depth to the game mechanics of the story. A customized system that will feel familiar. The MC has a templar class that is a combat class with healing, but the MC wields a modern firearm in addition to an axe and he has a bound dog companion that levels too. The RPG progression is regular, though you can tell some of the mechanics, like the nanocredits gained, are fleshed out as the story progresses.
Overall, while the combat in the novel is good with a variety of monsters, it's not enough to carry the story for me. The inconsistent level of darkness was a big turn off too. Either go full dark apocalypse where the evils of humanity show through or cut it out as it’s a distraction.
Score: 6 out of 10
Beta Test: 1st of the NanoWielder Saga