Angus's Reviews > The Land: Founding

This book is written enthusiastically, I'll give it that, though the writing is also full of typos and punctuation errors. But the plot, such as it is, is pretty poor stuff. A gaming enthusiast is transported to a world that's a near-exact replica of his favourite game. He's greeted by an imp who tells him, very forcibly, that he is no longer playing a game...but from there on, it stops making sense, because the remainder of the book shows very clearly that he is definitely still playing a game. The hero, Richter, is constantly receiving game messages and reading stat blocks for himself and anyone else he meets; and when he dies, he is instantly reborn. Whatever the underlying nature of this new world, its mechanics are exactly those of a game. Richter faces no real consequences for failure.

Reading the remainder of the book is about as interesting as reading a transcript of an actual computer game. Richter isn't a typical 'perfect' Mary-Sue; in fact he's quite arrogant and a bit of an asshole. But he faces no significant challenges in this book. The only hint of a real overarching plot is in the prologue…but the prologue, while giving a hint of why Richter has been thrown into this game-world, otherwise bears no visible relationship to the main story.

The further books of this series may improve matters; but this first book is bad enough that I doubt I'll check them out.