**A LitRPG tower climber adventure**
In the heart of the world there’s a tower that shouldn’t exist. One that has torn the fabric of reality and brought forth hordes of monsters thirsty for blood. A tower filled with loot, but one that’s spreading its corrupted roots across the land and showing no signs of stopping.
Enter Terry Byrne.
He spends his days working in a bar and the rest of the time he’s looking out for his little brother. He also scored highly on the aptitude tests for a stat rune, which would let him level up and earn abilities and choose a class.
But it comes with a price he’s never been willing to pay.
One day, though, he does something that leaves him no choice. On the run from the law, there’s only one job open to Terry now.
That job is called a tower climber.
In Tower Climber Terry you'll read about leveling up and rare abilities and an experience-based power progression.
My Opinion: 269 pages, $2.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
A directionless story set in a fantasy RPG world where the MC and his brother decide to try their hand adventuring in a multileveled monster filled tower. It's a setting that allows for some fine fights, short interactions, ok world building, but suffers from some issues that made the story not work for me.
Issues:
1) The dialogue of the MCs were a little too gamer. What I mean is that the characters are overly concerned with their builds, they use lots of RPG language, and consider how best to develop their stats based on what they do. Normally I like this, but in this story it felt a bit off considering both brothers just grew up in this medieval fantasy world and aren’t transported from our world or anything. They are also uneducated and had been doing low paying jobs before going on the run. It just didn’t mesh with the fantasy setting.
2) There’s no direction to the story. It’s not really necessary for a slice of life story, which this ultimately is. But it also meant that there didn’t feel like a point to the story and what the characters did weren’t particularly exciting aside from the semi regular fights. This shifts a little about 50% into the story when the MCs get a quest, but it serves as little more than an excuse to explore the tower.
3) The end was frustrating. The quest essentially resolves itself with no real crescendo in the story and almost with happenstance. Additionally, the single bad guy from the start of the story reappears but there’s no resolution with him.
The game mechanics are fine. After getting an artificial stat device, the characters got access to an RPG interface. There were plenty of notifications, ability and stat descriptions. Stat XP increases through using them with special abilities granted when the stats leveled. But honestly, I wasn’t really invested in the RPG progression since I never understood what was motivating the characters to want to improve, fight, or adventure.
Overall, it's not a badly written story but it wasn’t engaging, the first half is kinda forgettable, and the end was a little frustrating at how it did resolve the one plot quest and bad guy.
Score: 6 out of 10