LitRPG Audiobook Podcast 075 -Critical Failures IV, Tower of Ruin, Delvers LLC: Golden Handcuffs You can read the full reviews and show notes if you visit us at: https://litrpgpodcast.com/litrpg-audiobook-podcast-075 “Hello everyone. Welcome to the LitRPG Audiobook Podcast. I’m Ray. I’ll be reviewing some recent and classic LitRPG Audiobooks for you. I’ll begin with: ” Critical Failures IV: The Phantom Pinas (01:03) Score: 6.5 out of 10 https://amzn.to/3swePvk Tower of Ruin: Volume I (14:56) Score: 8.2 out of 10 https://amzn.to/3mZuXEB Soundbooth Spotlight Delvers LLC: Golden Handcuffs (22:56) Score: 7.6 out of 10 https://amzn.to/3mYi3Xu ------------------ Critical Failures IV: The Phantom Pinas Caverns and Creatures, Book 4 By: Robert Bevan Narrated by: Jonathan Sleep Series: Caverns and Creatures, Book 4 Length: 10 hrs and 33 mins Pause This is going to be a series review up to book four. Have reviewed other books in the series, but I’m going to talk about the over all arch and my thoughts on why I am done with this series in general. Bevan starts of with one of my favorite concepts. Gamers sucked into their gaming world. They inhabit the bodies of their characters, but keep their minds as players. There is an evil DM who they have to outwit, and the perils of the new world that is a combo of the player’s disbelief in where they are to the machinations of the nerdy DM. Premise and initial novel were great, and who doesn’t like an orc that craps himself everytime he turns around? Third book actually has a pretty cool vampire subplot, and the heroes figure out a way back home, before inevitably going back to where they came from with some other folks in tow. The problem is the series went from humorous to, and God forgive me for using this phrase, utterly cringe. I don’t even know if I’m using that term correctly, but I cringed throughout most of book 4. The short jokes, the poop jokes, the gay jokes are nothing new, and there were points where it just felt super forced an completely unfunny. I actually stopped halfway through book 4 and let it sit for a long time before coming back to it in the hopes that I just wasn’t in the right frame of mind, but no. What happened? What changed? First of all, the humor remained the same juvenile bunch of fart jokes without the humor. Kinda like how Stephen King does nothing but write novels around characters who pick boogers and bottles farts and adding in monsters or whatever. His stuff isn’t funny and neither is Bevan’s after the 7,000th time Horse is used. What else? The characters all of them, literally become dumber in this book. Maybe dimension hopping adversely affects brains, but no one acts like that have a bit of sense in their heads in this book. The only interesting part was the invention of a new god. Had I read this it would have felt like I had scrubbed my eyes with sandpaper, having listened to it it felt like I cleaned out my ears with a sewing needle. That wasn’t the fault of Jonathan Sleep, though. He is the one bright spot, and he does his best to make this book work. Too bad Bevan does nothing to help him succeed. Honestly, I’m done with the series, and you want to know the bad part? I have all the short story audiobooks and up to book 6, because I grabbed them all waaaaay back when I first read book one and have been parsing them out. And I will never finish them, and I have had them so long I can’t even turn them in for a refund, not that I would. I bought them, and I’m stuck with them. It’s on me for being so foolish. Up until now this series was a solid seven and a half, but this book is a 6.5. I didn’t enjoy, but you might, and I know the series has some staunch fans, so someone has to like it but I am through with uninspired and unoriginal “humor”. You want funny, get Noobtown or the Good/Bad guys series. You’ll be happier. 6.5 stars. ----------------------- Tower of Ruin: Volume I By: Wolfe Locke Narrated by: Travis Baldree Series: Pandemonium - Afterlife, Book 1 Length: 4 hrs and 9 mins Pause My biggest complaint is that this book is far too short, and I mean that in you are left wanting so much more. IN that sense, I suppose it reminds me of the Luck Stat Strategy by Blaise Corvin, as that too was a concise but impactful novel. The book is a tower climb novel, so fans of that subgenre will rejoice and it is also one of those sort of time travel back to the start novels that seems to get paired up with tower climbing. Basically, the MC exists in a tower that resets you when you die, but you start out completely new. The MC, Daniel, gets to keep his memory and gets a cool weapon when he goes back and has a chance to make changes and a difference, the problem is the tower has overseers and they were unstoppable the first time around, so if you couldn’t stop them the ...
