Descend: The Complete Series

Descend, Books 1-5

By: David Burke

Narrated by: Daniel Wisniewski, Rebecca Woods

Contains all five books in the Descend series.

First Steps, book one:

Boredom was killing Jay, not in a dramatic way, but in the life of stifled potential way.

He wanted more out of life. Then, without any warning, he found himself part of an experiment with not even so much as the courtesy of a "how do you do? ".

It wasn't really all bad, though. The fit, busty babes outnumbered him 30 to one. Now, Jay has to fight to survive. He has to conquer the dungeon or die. On top of that, he has to juggle a bunch of gorgeous women who are all stuck in the same life-or-death fight as him. If ever there was a time for bonding...

But most confusing of all are the messages in his dreams. Messages that seem to be coming from himself.

Coming Together, book two:

One dungeon floor down, but how many more to go?

Jay and company have survived the initial stages of the experiment. They have had to overcome everything from their dinner trying to eat them to murderous psychopaths trying to carve out a private fiefdom. Worse, they aren't even aware of the impact the dissent among the aliens running this experiment is having on them.

Now, all the survivors seem to want a piece of Jay, which when they are a bunch of hot girls, doesn't seem entirely bad. He just has to sort out who is trying to manipulate him and who wants to be on Team Jay—all the while, finding a way for humanity to survive.

Going Deeper, book three:

Jay has gotten his cluster to come together. But new challenges always appear.

Most frustrating is an old crush from Earth joins them and throws questions into all of Jay's relationships. One truth remains. Their only hope is to grow stronger. To do that, they have to descend deeper into the dungeon. At the same time, Jay has to decide how he feels about the women in his life.

Bursting Out, book four:

The dungeon has become too small to contain their power.

Jay and the others are aware of the fact that they are on a ship the size of the moon. More than that, they know they are the last survivors of Earth. They have to round up the rest of the clusters, build their power further, and burst out of this prison.

Follow Jay as he learns to embrace the power he has but, more importantly, the power of fusion, where the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Seeing Stars, book five:

Sometimes, before you can rise up, you must descend first.

They have beaten the dungeon. Now they are launched out into a cold universe. The remnants of humanity need to find a new home. They will meet alien races. Some will be allies. Some will need to be killed.

Nothing worth doing is ever easy, but Jay has accepted his place and will take charge of their destiny.

(P)2025 Podium Audio

good start. interesting premise. but gets progressively worse

I liked the start. it was an interesting spin on the dungeon trope. the characters were well written. then it went down hill from there. with the expansion of the harem all character building goes out the window. the initial struggle fades away to increasingly reckless gimmicks that have zero negative consequences. then by the time the enemy actually appears, which will take forever and be very brief, it becomes a one sided OP beat down by the Mc. the explicit scenes are well done but get bogged down with the rest of the story. a potential good stroy that gets crushed under the weight of its own power fantasy/harem trope.

After book 1 or maybe it was 2 half the chapters became stat sheets, monotonous procreation scenes, or upgrade reports.. lame…

It started off pretty well but after book 3 it just became 75% stat upgrading and doing research with no direct benefit to the story line. The story line kind of ended after book 2 and the last 3 were the characters just cheating their way out of the ending.

When i listen to 5 books worth of content i want to hear a good story! Not 10 chapters of nonsense and basic sex scenes.. the main character is a pathetic loser.

meh, not horrible, not anything special either.

got it on sale for like $6, made it 22hrs in and am just kinda over it lol.

briefer up top. more detailed below.

premise is great, starts strong, fall off though. characters are all just kinda really dumb and don't seem to have any common sense at all. voice actors good. but wayyy too much husky breathing, even outside of sex scenes, it's weird and awkard. there are a lot of sex scenes, even for a harem book. over 1/3 of the 22hrs i read is just banter and dumb conversation full of husky breathing, or him trying to figure out how he upset girls by saying good morning wrong, literally. I'd say about half of what I listened to is skippable... and I'm the guy that relistens to a whole series when a new book comes out, with minimal skipping or speeding up, lol.

ok, so the premise is awesome, and it starts off strong imo. but I think the truth is, that the author doesn't have the skills to write highly intelligent characters, cause man they be doing all kinds of just dumb stuff that just makes no sense, at a constant pace across the board. and plot holes everywhere. I think the voice actor are actually good too, but there is a ridiculous amount of husky sexy breathing, outside of spicy scenes, it's just weird and awkward, even for a harem book, like eating lunch talking about skills and it sounds like a spicy scene, even though its not... finally, theres wayyy too much focus on the relationships between MC and the girls, I'm talking 15mins convos on how he upset one of the girls by saying good morning to her the wrong way... literally a scene. and there's just too many sex scenes even for a harem book. like almost every in book night has a detailed sex scenes between 10-25mins long...

the unique alien story and multiple for enemies

pacing seemed a little slow and fast in the beginning but overall I would highly recommend it was definitely an interesting story that kept my attention

Overall very good really frustrating MC

Okay so before I complain too much the series is very good and I would definitely recommend getting it especially the bundle. With that being said some spoilers may be ahead so don’t read if you wanna go in blind. Now you gotta know this MC is gonna frustrate you for like 4 outta the 5 books while he is OP with powers he is unbelievably annoying to listen to for most of the series he has negative spine and literally is just pushed into doing whatever the girls tell him without standing up to literally anything even when he says something is wrong with it. This is another of those harem books where even though it makes complete sense as to why there is a harem the MC cries about it and is forced into it for about 95% of the series which gets old very fast. I also did not like how the story panned out while it was a fantastic premise and overall solid I think the series spent too long in the first ship and then rushed the ending when it should have been the complete opposite on top of that book 4 should have been completely exploring the new ship instead of the rushed job that book 5 had. Then book 5 should have been the final showdown and then spent more time settling the humans and colonies instead the first 60% of book 5 is a slog of just boring stale training montages then we get a 5 min epilogue explaining briefly how everything panned out for the humans which was super unsatisfying.