Gearing Up

Publisher's Summary

Alvin had another rough week, but at least this time, he had Gothy with him.  

Travelling from Utah to Nevada, they were able to set up two more Settlements. Then they had to visit the world of Fey to rescue the kids of the Beatty, Nevada, Settlement. Just when things looked like they were going well, the Developers got involved.  

With the very rules of the game changing, Alvin found himself in a new position. Gothy pledged herself to him through the game system, leaving her collared and bound to obey his every whim. Coming to terms with their new relationship, Alvin wondered what would come next.  

He wasn’t expecting a road trip north to loot an abandoned town, nor the dragon that guarded it. What came as the biggest surprise was the chance encounter with a fantasy race whose gate had opened. What would come of this fateful meeting?  

This audiobook contains adult situations, in all their horror and glory, including sex, abuse, drug use, and murder. It also contains graphic sex scenes that portray elements of BDSM. You’ve been warned.

©2018 Daniel James Schinhofen (P)2019 Daniel James Schinhofen

Welcome Tess Irondale!

It is easy to guess that Andrea Parsneau is swamped with all the other projects she is working on. I almost always immediately pick up anything she narrates. She did a great job with with Apocalypse Gates but luckily I love Tess Irondale’s work just as much.

Natural Consequences is one of my all time favorite series, and I stumbled upon it entirely on accident. I highly recommend checking out that and her other work. I’m looking forward to her continuation of Apocalypse Gates, and I appreciate all of Tess Irondale’s effort to remain true to what we’ve come to love.

7 of 8 people found this review helpful

Blandness and voice actors

I understand that you can’t always get the same VA but man it’s hard to go from the previous one to this new one. I don’t particularly care for the voices she gives to the characters either.

But for the story, it went from action, adventure and meaningful relationships to a bdsm sex festival and annoying side characters. The previous two books had a great way of introducing characters and development of them as well, but again this one seems to just ignore that and throw tropes at you.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

Same problems as his alpha world series...

Just like in the Daniel Shinhofen's "Alpha World" series; the world building takes a back seat in the third book. So now that world building is gone we get to focus on the relationship of the MC and Gothy. Alvin becomes even more of an ass and Gothy encourages him to be even worse. I didnt enjoy the direction this series decided to take. Sadly I think this is were I leave.

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

narrator review

the story was good but the changing narrator was kind of a big change but it was still really good

2 of 2 people found this review helpful

to much sex not enough story

liked the first two books. but had a tough time with this one just seemed like the focus was on the sex and not the story

1 of 1 people found this review helpful

Promising series devolves into BDSM gag-fest.

Pun in honor of the crappy and unfortunately ubiquitous flirt-banter between the MC’s. This series was riding the line that only a few of it’s contemporaries have managed to do... That is to be a good enough story that you’re willing to fast-forward through the poorly written sex scenes and flirty dialogue written by authors who clearly don’t have enough personal experience to pull them off.

It’s like listening to the dirty fantasies of 14 year old boys and it’s disgusting: I’m not talking about the topic, I’m referring to the experience of listening to some furiously masturbating, shut-in author’s desire to connect with furiously masturbating, shut-in listeners who share the same extremely vanilla and unimaginative sexual fantasies and believe they are being ever so naughty. It’s like picking up a landline phone and accidentally overhearing your father’s pay-per-minute phone-sex chat session... So, gross. I’m going to go disinfect my ears now.

What was I talking about?... oh right, Gearing Up... the LitRPG story in this installment is still really pretty good, but Shinhoffen (famous for being unable to write a story without basting it liberally with bad porn) has so thoroughly inundated this book with cheesey “sexy-talk” and laughably bad, semi-hardcore porn scenes that it rendered the fast forward method largely unusable.

Normally I’d just give a book like this 2 stars and move on with my life, but it’s become so frustrating to see so many viable LitRPG series made unlistenable by this disturbing trend of inundating them with harems and 13-year-old sex fantasies.

Please, get your Penthouse Forum letters out of my GameLit... I’m begging you.

6 of 9 people found this review helpful

change of narrator?

I just can't I love the series up until this point but with the change of narrator I feel like I've lost touch with friends

The non-stop Dom fantasy is getting tedious.

The attempt at building a dark and borderline bad guy anti hero has become a corny cliche version of 50 Shades. All the masochism and dominance is really getting awkward not that it is terribly bad it's just that it's steadily growing in abundance to the point where it might just be the focus of the story now. I'm starting to wonder if his plan is to phase out the story line all together and just produce compilations of corny, cliche 'Im so dark and tough' lines followed by awkward dom-fantasys.

boring

boring had no real plot just lots of talking and fucking all 3 books are basicly letters too penthouse. gets old

Changes

So there are a few changes with book 3:
1. Narrator change. This always sucks, fortunately though, the narrator was able to keep the same tonal personalities with the characters. The narrator has something of a nasal or congested sound when performing most dialog.

2. The BDSM escalated very quickly in this book. In the first two books, it was primarily very dirt talking with the sexual content, the author has included BDSM - things, or toys - in this book. Its very Fifty Shades if you ask me... the only difference is the amount of dirty talk.

3. The over use of the word "Hero" is slightly curbed in this book, but still annoying.

4. The rules of the "game" change in this book. I really wish that Jarvis would revert back to his previous voice, while keeping the name Jarvis. The perceived butler personality is a little much.

There is also a weird thing of Gothy/Becky's and Hero/Alvin's name. Hero and Gothy are nicknames the MCs gave to each other, which is fine, but they have both started to use the names as introductory alias when meeting new characters in the story.

Its been hard to keep track of how much time has passed, but the author's description of game mechanics tends to change by the minute and I dont think all of the plot points are being thought out very well.

For now I still like the story.