Battle Avatars Book Review

Battle Avatars by Ed White was published on September 18th, 2019. There are two books in the series so far. I have no idea if there will be more books to come. This is just a review on book one.

The story starts off predictably enough, David is in a job he does not like and nothing is really going too well for him. This is a pretty normal starting for LitRPG books so I wasn't too shocked when his friend convinces him to try a new VRMMORPG game. This game is called Lenscape. This is where the story gets more interesting and shows its own unique take on LitRPG. In this world you can be any race in the game and you get starter/end-game weapons that you have to advance into items of total destruction with cores or seeds. Classes are also an optional part of the game, but many feel they are too constricting. David starts playing a little, but not much longer than an hour after starting, he runs into some hackers. Because of that David is recruited to be an undercover mod, with a real world salary. He still has to start the game from scratch but he gets to do it with his friend (the one who invited him) and his friend's gamer group. They all had to remort to be able to play the game as undercover mods. The story will follow David trying to progress through the game, with him bettering his character, while also trying to find some mysterious hackers.

This was not a good book, but nor was it a bad book. I feel bad because lately I have written less than positive reviews. I feel like I have hit a bit of a dry spot but the next one should be more positive, so there's that. The reason I did not like this book though, well, I also didn't dislike it, was because it just never really held my attention for long. There were times for a page or two where I was getting excited, hoping it was about to get better, but that never did not last long. At the end I felt like the author tried to leave the book on a cliffhanger but did not do it well. I'll give an example of what this cliffhanger sounded like, "the hackers had blue uniforms, and what else is blue? The sky! The sky has white clouds... oh! Polar bears are white... so maybe these bad guys use the cold to freeze the environment and hack the game." The real one made a little more sense, but not by much more. I felt like the author wanted to add a big twist at the end so people would read the next book in the series when it comes out, but it just did not work for me. I won't continue with this book, like I said it was just okay but the last few chapters got worse because of the weird nonsensical theories and other things like that. Some aspects of the story were just silly though, paid to be a mod, a possible conspiracy involving a connection between in-game souls and real world souls, possibly a family trying to create this game for hundreds of years. It just wasn't good because there were so many secrets the author was setting up in the future but not enough happening now. Maybe in the future everything comes together and it all makes sense, but I can't see that it will make reading through these 361 mediocre pages worth it, not when there are much better series out there. If you can't tell I don't recommend this book. The author has potential but I feel like this book wasn't interesting enough, the author is saving too much for later and not using enough now. If he ever comes out with another series I will try that and see if he mixes in a little more action for book one in a series.