In this intense, heart-pounding LITRPG SCI-FI SERIES, you meet a young man named Russett who works for a company called Ver2Real, which is in the is responsible for creating and maintaining different virtual reality systems. Their newest VR system is called Virtual Environment, Remote—Induction and Training System; also known as VERITAS. Russett is the civilian contractor in charge of their biggest project yet, which is with the United States Department of Defense.
The military basically has us building virtual environments for their soldiers to train in. The company’s technology is cutting edge. We can put any healthy adult in one of the immersion pods and send them into these digital worlds that, to them, are indistinguishable from reality. The edge that VERITAS has over the other VR systems is that it actually hooks into the user’s brain and puts them into a kind of RPG system. Their attributes are measured by the system and hundreds of variables are fed into the simulation. While the users feel like they’re engaged in real-time combat, the results are all simulated too, just like in RPG games.
UNFORTUNATELY - VERITAS doesn't have sufficient power to handle real-time combat in such VRMMORPG, which leads to a whole slew of problems that Russett must fix!
My Opinion: 44 pages, $0.99, Available on Kindle Unlimited
A super short story at 44 pages. Even at .99, expensive for the page count. But also on KU. The beginning seems to be a big push to collect email addresses for a mailing list. Not my favorite move.
The story itself takes a good long while to get to anything resembling LitRPG. There’s lots of talk early in the short story about RPG mechanics existing in the game but you don’t actually see any until the 65% mark. However, once they show up, it does become an entertaining read with the characters training, improving stats, and leveling. Everything before that is a sometimes implausible justification to get everyone trapped in the game and setup the stakes for the story.
Two small things that bothered me. 1) The early parts of the story have combat logs that don’t mean anything because the reader isn’t given context for what the numbers mean yet. It’s annoying. 2) The automatic time compression feature just doesn’t make sense. Unless the computer is using the player’s brains to run the game, why would it matter if more or less people are playing? Why would that affect how long the players feel like they’re in the game?
Overall, a good read once the RPG mechanics showed up. The cliffhanger ending is going to bother some people but I didn’t mind. The story has decent action scenes and it could use more world and character development. But I still plan to pick up the next episode in the series. It’s a nice start that I hope develops into something really good.
Score: 7 out of 10