ARA Review by M. D. Sanders of VR Wars

[M. D. Sanders]

[Following is an OnlineBookClub.org ARA Review of the book, VR Wars.]

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3 out of 5 stars

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I found VR Wars: Awakening to be worth a solid 3 out of 5 stars. A pleasant enough book to kill time with if you can get it free with Kindle Unlimited, and it's the type of story you enjoy. In which for me, I generally consider a book I enjoy enough to complete to be at least three stars, where to be four stars it would need to be written well enough that I want to continue the story.

The book is a power fantasy about a socially inept, history loving gamer, who- in a world where historically based VR war games have become vital to the future of the world's nations’ college funding- overcomes the difficulties of social castes and incompetent leadership to drag his college's team to victory using his understanding of tactics derived from historic warfare. Despite their best efforts to the contrary.

In which I found the war games themselves and the tactics used interesting and fun to read about, but the dialogue and characterizations lackluster and occasionally cringe inducing, and the premise just a bit contrived. It feels like the world setting was forced together in order to make the war games be as serious and important as they treat them instead of like the video games they are. While- at the same time- despite them BEING so important, it's made so that the college would be wholly incapable of victory without the main character stepping in both to play the hero to save them, and to fix their obviously broken systems and lead them. Even though he is, again, a socially inept gamer.

Also, the prologue is a large chunk of historic exposition that's a bit tedious to slog through- and it does not help that the ending breaks from the up to then hyper-realistic historic combat system to throw in previously unmentioned elements that jerked me out of my suspension of disbelief.

All in all: if you like loner geek gamer power fantasies and interesting, semi-realistic depictions of historically styled warfare, and happen to have a few hours to kill, it might be worth picking up. Where if you want to find realistic storytelling and witty dialogue... maybe keep looking.

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[Fabio Barcelos]

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