Respawn: Lives 1-5

Respawn, Book 1

By: Arthur Stone

Narrated by: Michael David Axtell

Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's Summary

You are no one. Level zero. Empty of mind and memory. Even your past has been stripped from your brain by the inscrutable System.

A long, difficult road lies between you and remembering any part of who you are. A road punctuated with one death after another. You are too puny to survive by might alone. Information is the single resource that might keep you alive, but the brainless “digis” have none of it. Only those with experience can give you what you need, but most care nothing about you or your plight. In fact, some make it their mission to kill you.

So die you will, again and again, your life counter clicking lower and lower. Even the creators do not know what happens when your counter reaches zero, but many are sure that your last life here is just that. No more respawns.

You are not the first player in the world of STYX, and you will not be the last. You can only hope luck will be on your side. The luckiest players are those who find a vulnerability in the System. Those they call cheaters.

Perhaps cheating is the only way to win.

Enjoy your game.

©2018 Arthur Stone (P)2020 Podium Publishing

Rape this girl cause she's fat

This is what the MC wanted for a girl because he thought her ugly and fat. Said he would cheer the man that did it too.
Other than that the story was unique. Couldn't figure out why the girl was OK with it, never mentioning it. She rightly called the guy a moron repeatedly, but I'd use a different word or two about him.
Spoiler : she ignores his continued comments about her and offers to help and meet up at which time he says "I'm here, but I don't see a fat ostrich anywhere". Mind you, this is while he thinks she is actually fat, not as a barb to a friend. So inexplicably this is all OK with her.
This strange, obviously evil person, is who we are supposed to follow in the story. Which makes an otherwise interesting story into something of a moral question. Does the listener want to ignore the issue that the main character is cheering for a person to be raped because of her lack of beauty and is fine with throwing awful jabs that aren't presented as haha funny but are presented as harmful insults? If so, buy the book and series.

good book with a some problems

I struggled with enjoying the Mc at the beginning of the book he changes slowly but at the end is still someone I'm not sure i want to succeed. i hope this changes when he remembers who he is.

Glad I didn't refund it!

The MC was just someone I couldn't stand and the author almost lost me as a customer. I hung in there and the story and characters got better and I'm waiting on book 2 to hopefully clarify some things. It's a good book and the litrpg is interesting. it's worth a credit but hey I like litrpg.

Excellent

I went in blind on this one. I assumed from the title that this was a litrpg and was correct. While not a traditional it does have game mechanics in a modern like setting. I didn't know what to expect but what I got was better than I imagined. This story had great character development and interesting world building. Be advised it has some darker tones to it. But I am very interested to see what book two brings to the table.

Edit: Revisited the book after a while and my opinion has completely changed. While I like the later installments, this book is bad. It starts of fairly interesting, but the main character act like a prechooler with the mouth of an adult. He just says everything on his mind and most of it is horrible when it comes to one character.

That being said you could probably skip this book :/

This LiRPG is hard to classify but good

This book is interesting. The main character wakes and immediately finds he doesn't remember anything. The world immediately goes wonky. It immediately gets bad for him.
The MC doesn't even know his name, and finds himself in a world that loads in. Then must find his way.
This story is about his journey and him trying not to die before he learns.

Well the world mechanics are good.

The world and the stat mechanics are unique and interesting, but the MC and BBEG are super lackluster and irritating. The MC is profoundly stupid beyond reason because amnesia and some system induced mental repression. Which the author uses to explain the world and the way stats work which is k. Except the MC can't be told to do anything without asking "why?". Everything is debated / argued / repeated which really gets annoying. He is also about as funny as a school shooting using classic jokes like "hey your ugly how about we get drunk" and "I know your dad... big gay orgies". The BBEG just wants to rape everyone so thats a thing. I look forward to exploring clusters, encountering new variations of infecteds, and finding new loot, but couldn't really care less if the MC ever makes it back to Kitty. Also Kitty makes zero sense.

Unique take on the zombie apocalypse and litrpgs

This book takes the best bits of the zombie apocalypse ,the series Lost and litrpg trope and plops it into world of its very own.

However I do have one complaint with this book. Despite being a very well written, better than most you will find on audible, the MC says and thinks things a 13 year old would find embarrassing. To the point it almost put me off the book. So I am happy I kept going as from second book onwards he improves vastly.

This is my first review on this site as I really hope to see more from this series. The Respawn books is one the few audiobooks I listen to more than once and has become a instant preorder for me.