Luke Tavares has dreamed of joining the vast gaming guilds of the hypernet. After recently graduating high school, his parents have given him the same ultimatum as his siblings; he has one month to get a job to pay for his air, gravity, and water aboard the Dahlia.
The freighter needs more hands, but Luke doesn’t want to be a trader-ship engineer. In Sphere World, he can mine asteroids, build bots, and make weapons to fuel the system-wide war between nodes.
As a free player, it is his own credits on the line. But when his opponents are the very guilds that he wishes to join, he’s going to have to use every trick he knows to win.
My Opinion: 671 pages, $5.99, Available On Kindle Unlimited
This is a GameLit story that takes a FPS, Real Time Strategy, Space Fighter, and Civ building types of game genres and puts them together in a full immersion MMO story. I didn’t find all of the in-game stuff interesting but parts of it were enough that I kept reading. The PvP elements and the spaceship fighting just aren’t the kind of game I like, so they were less interesting than the crafting, resource gathering, guild v guild conflicts in game, and real world storyline.
I actually really enjoyed the real world conflicts as they had serious tension and consequences to what the MC was trying to accomplish. It's rare you see a court case and corporate espionage and conflict in a game lit story and it was a nice change to the conflict in the story. I also liked the space age real world that the MC lived in and the wealth consequences to doing well in the game.
On the game mechanics side of things, it’s pretty decent. I wish there were more RPG elements, like set classes, stat increases, and skill increases. Instead, players log into bots in the MMO that go onto setup their build and if they die they have to buy another bot which can be setup for whatever loadout they need for a mission. The missions themselves are nice with options for conquering nodes, defending nodes, protection, spaceship fights, drop-off missions, and more. The crafting and resource gathering elements are also a big aspect to the game side of the story and the conflicts between guilds was well written.
Overall, it's a good story. I found a little less enjoyment just because I don’t play the competitive team combat games. But readers who are interested in that genre will likely find a lot more enjoyment. Otherwise, the other elements of the story were interesting and the story was fun.
Score: 7.4 out of 10