Elf Empire 3: Steelport

A LitRPG Kingdom-Building Adventure

By: John Stovall

Narrated by: Todd Haberkorn

Length: 14 hrs and 52 mins

Publisher's summary

Leo is finally ready to go find Audrey—in the heart of his first enemy's territory!

Leo, Hugh, Lily, Neha, and Andul are returning to Steelport to save Audrey, who has been captured by House Orsini, the first enemies of Leo's kingdom. Mavis Orsini is prepared to finish them off once and for all with the aid of Kruegar and his orc legions.

Meanwhile, Ygg'drasil has opened its first portal to Ice Pines, a dimension of cold and storms. A great opportunity, but new enemies wait to take everything Leo has built from him, and he needs more allies and treasures if he wants to defend his realm.

Leo is on a deadline now, as the tyrant, King Damian, has sworn to kill Lily's mother and the elf refugees unless Leo delivers a truly absurd amount of money to him within ninety days. Leo must find allies with which to rescue his paramour's mother or enough treasure to pay the ruinous demands.

Can Leo save Audrey, stop Mavis, and handle the new portal in time to also rescue Lily's mother and the other captured elves from Damian? It'll be a ride, but he doesn't intend to fall.

©2023 Capital Station Books (P)2024 Podium Audio

the author

I don't need a speck read out every time the entire speck read out does not need to be read out every time I'm just saying changes noted full thing no.

Ending

Best book so far , can’t wait to read the next book ya bird and loons

Great narration

I really love the story. It is very good and well written. It has great character development. It does get a little long winded when it goes into the characters looking at their stats and what those stats do. For me that was where the story dragged a bit. The rest of the story was amazing and I often found myself listening longer than I intended because it was so good. What was really amazing was the voice acting. I just love Todd Haberkorn's work. The fact that he took the time to do a different voice for each character amazes me and made the whole story come to life. He truly is a master of his work.

Seemed whole book was stat page

I have listened to the first two books and they were good. More of a filler in between the releases of other books but still enjoyable. This one however seemed that a quarter of the entire book was just listening to an exhaustively long stat page. The story and writing didn’t seem well developed, almost like it was just phoned in just to release something and the stats were there to just hit a minimum of words for a book. Take out the filler and it is a decent short story. Still confused as to why an American character has a British accent…

All my gripes just get worse.

I started this series enjoying the premise and characters. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was good *enough* to move forward. I enjoyed little moments like no one understood the MC's earth idioms, and then others getting to know him *also* adopting those idioms and confusing even more people. It was unique.

The characters, their reactions, and how they responded to the world were just realistic enough to be on a level above most of the mediocre millennial litrpg slop that comes out these days.
The narration was also on point, and the book does at least *some* work to explain why the world is the way it is in a satirical manner, which caused me to smirk on more than one occasion.

However, my MAIN gripes with this series only get worse in this book, and happen more frequently than ever before:

++ Stat sheets are LONG, FREQUENT, and IN THE MIDDLE OF CHAPTERS AND DIALOGUE!!!! Seriously, 3 hours of this book is stat summary. That along with the important interpersonal dialogue and planning thought process in the middle of it all made me hesitant to skip the slog that is the ever-updating stat sheet. If you skip the stat sections, 20% of the book, you WILL miss important parts of the story. I really wish the author made it easier for audible users to skip these sections. I'm sure they are a pain to read as well, but not nearly as bad as listening.

++ This story manufactures drama. And it's so obvious in the book you can FEEL the cheese, almost like a soap opera. Expect the MC to be mildly interesting and competent until the moment he has an important decision to make. Expect villains to have the possibility of being great up until they come in front of the MC and make the dumbest decisions ever. This author is better than most at developing characters, but sacrifices it all to put the MC in harms way, which just feels manufactured. Often, in the most important parts of the book or "lives" of the characters you'll find yourself thinking "there's no way they'd act like that in real life."

So what do we have? An above-average litrpg that does well with character building(not world building), only to have it cash in its brownie points on forcing the MC into neverending drama. Feels like the TV show "24."
That along with the excessive stat sheets summaries and unwieldy navigation of those moments left me enjoying only a fraction of the book.

I will not be continuing this series.

The plot is good, but half of book is Stats...

The creative plot is great. The main character made a lot of poor decisions this book, but still lucked out. It would have been better if stats weren't detailed and repeated every other chapter though.

Good book, but… THE EXCESSIVE STATS

I have enjoyed this series, but the stats this time around seemed excessive. Story build up to just read stats for close to 7-10 minutes at a time. There had to be close to an hour or so of just reading stats this time around… please, a way to shorten it or even have the stats as its own chapter so it’s easier to get back to the story would be helpful. When it came down to it, the only stat that truly felt like it made a difference is the lvl gap, everything else seemed cool but excessive.

With that in mind, I’ll still for sure keep reading this series as the character development has been great along with world building.