MOB Grind (Raid Online)

A litRPG Light Adventure

By: Isaac Stone, Timothy Mayer, Sean-Michael Argo

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Length: 6 hrs and 11 mins

Publisher's summary

Enlil is one of the most fierce and successful warrior-gamers in the full immersion MMORPG known as Raid Online, developed by the government of a post-apocalyptic bunker society to keep the population entertained as they hide away from the polluted surface world. With his warhammer and his wolf he has earned himself fame and fortune in this grim dystopia, all to help his invalid sister fight off a crippling disease. Enlil must lead his adventure party into a new game expansion that promises glory and rewards enough for the group to buy their way out of the slums and into the higher levels of bunker living. As they fight their way through mysteries and monsters, they must come to terms with deadly demons, treacherous competitors, and the challenges of a game scenario that is more savage than they could have possibly imagined. *This is an immersive virtual reality novel, so for those seeking stat crunching, consider this a 'soft' litRPG story.

Poor narration by essentially a fancyscreen reader

As a blind person I have a lot of experience listening to both audio books and e-books read out by screen readers, which is essentially what "Virtual voice" is. Unfortunately this means that you get all the short comings of a screen reader with none of the benefits of an actual person narrating a book.

I should also mention that whom ever was in charge of proof reading and producing this book did a very poor job as there were so many typos that a screen reader can't correct on the fly unlike a human narrator. This essentially leaves words that should be read as "your" read out as "you". Something that also happens often is this artificial narrator doesn't use the proper pronunciations of words that the same spelling but totally different meanings or definitions such as the word "Bow". Virtual voice also can't properly pronounce words that should be read out as sounds such as "Psst", reading it out as P S S T. There are also times when the proper pauses and breaks are not taken which cause certain dialogue to come off as a run on sentence, especially when a second person is speaking immediately after someone finishes.

This will probably be the last book I read that is read by "Virtual voice" as it takes too much concentration on the listeners part just to understand what it's trying to narrate. Buying an e-book using a built in screen reader is a much smoother experience, especially since it's again very apparent that whom ever produced the audio did a very poor job of correcting all of the errors mentioned above. In fact I'd almost guess that person never even listened to the final product due to the amount of typos and errors. Human narrators are superior in almost every way.

As far as the book it's really hard for me to give a review on it as so much of my time was spent trying to ignore the poor choppy narration, however if I'm being honest it wasn't a bad book. It also wasn't a great book but I'd perhaps think of trying to find this in e-book format rather than suffering through the poor narration.