![EvP [Environment vs. Player] (New Era Online, #2)](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1531232749i/40774974.jpg)
| Title | : | EvP [Environment vs. Player] (New Era Online, #2) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 794 |
| Publication | : | Published July 9, 2018 |
His old guild have discovered his village's location and a deadly strike force is closing in. With time running out, Oren must build up his clan and recruit an army of monsters if he's to have any hope of withstanding the coming attack.
EvP [Environment vs. Player] (New Era Online, #2) Reviews
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Book two
I read this in one go. Of course I read a lot of books in one go, but most of them I can put down and do something else for a few hours. I just didn't want to put this book down. People say The Land series is the best. I'm of the opinion that this series is better. -
Just couldn't put it down. Awesome
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Yeah, the more I read LitRPG, the more apparent it becomes that the settlement-building kind is what I really like.
This book was a nice follow-up to the series, except for the weak points that seem to recur in LitRPG.
- A total disregard for combat-time (people having conversations while fighting just makes the whole experience... absurd)
- way too many "remind me", "need I remind you" and "as you know" extremely flakey info-dump through dialogue. It was just... bad.
- the bad guy's motivation was illogical, or rather, moronic.
Had those issues been ironed out (maybe a last rewrite, or an editor?), the book could have gone up to a 4 stars, because I really liked the world in itself. -
So many bots boosting the rating.
The whole plot makes zero sense, motivations of the bad guy (and actions) are just borderline retarded.
Top 100 guild can't spare 10 high level players to go annihilate some goblins, shit most people would go out of there way in MMO game to stamp on somebodies sandcastle just because they can.
The romance part added nothing to this book. Zero. Nil. Nada. Just filler.
The mentality change, rages had a plot purpose, but were badly done and cringy. -
Fantastic. Absolutely fantastic.
Awesome writing!
Loved it. -
Rating 4.25 stars
This is a very good book for people who like 3 things: LitRPG, world building, and complex game mechanics (level ups, stat points, etc). Oren is building up his small goblin village. His goal is to reach boss level 4 in order to try and log out of the game. Oren knows that the players are coming to get him though, so he has to work quickly. Almost the entire book is spent building the village, power leveling his people and himself, as well as learning skills that can help him survive. I love this type of book!
Just like the first book, Oren is insanely overpowered for his level, but at the same time the odds are stacked so far against him that even if he was twice as powerful he would still be in trouble. A couple of things pop up throughout the book that complicates matters
I took 3/4 of a star off for two reasons:
I am worried about the next book though. Just with the set up at the end of this book I can come up tons of reasons that his plan isn't going to work. And I have been so impressed with Oren's strategies up to this point. I hope he doesn't make me regret saying that in the next book. -
In many books, LitRPG and otherwise, we meet snarky companions. It starts with playful banter but at times they become unnecessarily rude in name of being snide. This is exactly how
SpecOps ruined the series for me.
But that's exactly where this book shines the most. Vic is an outstanding companion. He loves teasing our Totem but he is one of the most genuinely caring and lovable companion I've seen since Sylphrena from
The Way of Kings. At times he's the only person standing between our Totem and madness.
That brings to my next point. Like Kaladin in Way of Kings, Oren has faced lot of torture which nearly breaks him. He now has an identity crisis where he is sometimes unable to differentiate between the game world and reality. In fact I wasn't expecting this by reading the book name but that's one of the main things. EvP is a really good summarization to the story. And it is so well written. You can feel the identity crisis and you feel like you want to be in Vic's place, trying to help Oren.
Also, if you are a fan of city building stories, this will exceed your expectations. It exceeded mine anyways.
Can't recommend the series enough. This book was better than the 1st one by a long shot. -
Ehhhhh, not an improvement over the first.
Introduced new players and Characters? Cool, then make them more a part of the story. Pretty much all side characters were forgotten about in this installment. Then, on the last edit, the author decided to cram a few asides to round it out. The sabotage side-plot was just bad, laughably so. The MC got a little too predictable in this one as well.
This book has one strength and its settlement building and game mechanics. However, you can't just focus solely on that or it will get old fast. That's why I was looking forward to POV's from different players. That is until they were promptly all forgotten about until they were smashed into the last few chapters. -
If you love LitRPG buy this series!
Oren's adventures in city building continue in the second installment of this series. If you are a fan of The Land or any of the other top LitRPG books, you need to buy these books! Thank me later. -
Great sequel. Character development took a backseat. This book is more focused on action than the characters.
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The direct sequel to Life Reset, this book is a masterwork of LitRPG. With an engaging protagonist, sympathetic side characters, a heavy focus on settlement building and a tense, exciting timebomb plot, Life Reset: EvP has everything fans of the first book - and of LitRPG in general - could possibly want.
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Fantastic continuation
This is a fantastic continuation of a wonderful series. I love the length of each book and I adore that it's a builder. There are few books that match this one in creativity and pure enjoyment 5 stars well earned sir -
Who wants to build a village? I do!
Summary:
If you want a good old LitRPG with lots of world-building and some convoluted game mechanics you've found your series. Our hero theBread.... "Dread Totem" is gearing up for the upcoming invasion set on him by his former guildmates. In order to survive this conflict, he needs to continue building up his army, his village's economy, his skills, and most importantly his mental state.
Oren has started to see plenty of upsides about being a Tier 2 boss, but sadly life in NEO is much like in Earth. You always have to keep moving, because someone is always looking to bring you down. And Oren has all kinds of enemies after him, but the most challenging one is definitely himself. Sometimes your worst enemy isn't even other people, it's you. But no need to worry, GUY is all about having you succeed by continuously facing adversity. It's all part of the system.“It’ll be okay, Oren. We’ll finish this quest together, and once we do, you’ll be even stronger than before.” His voice sounded weird suddenly, almost ancient. “That’s how the system works, it puts seemingly insurmountable challenges in front of you, but those who pass the test are rewarded for it. That is the game and the prison it creates in your mind.”
Throughout most of the book, we get to see Oren trying to recover from a damaged psyche. During the first half, we see him act as if he was a full-on native. From starting to call players "travelers", to acting out on their racial hatred towards other races because of what the system states, and even having to battle against a goblin's baser instincts towards life-partners. This book uses lots of moments to show you that the consequences stated in the first installment weren't understated and that real-life immersion in a video game can be as painful as it can be pleasurable. Sadly, even when he snaps back to reality after a friendly intervention he'll have to constantly be on guard against the perils of the system due to his hybrid status.The nightmare touched on a deep fear I tried to suppress. I couldn’t avoid facing the issue any longer, I had to face the reality: Little by little, this world … this game was shattering my psyche, one piece at a time. I have to get out of here, or I’ll end up a savage, ruthless monster, I thought bitterly.
Meanwhile, the traitor Vartas has commissioned a raiding party to go and destroy the clan in order to then capture and enslave Oren for his Prime Badges. Oren now has six weeks to raise a strong enough combat force to repel the oncoming attack. Luckily, NEO has decided to make his little village a starting point for a new type of player, goblinoids. With their arrival, he now has a bit of help on building up his village and its defenses. Sadly not every player is keen on seeing the Green Piece Clan survive this challenge. Oren now has to face enemies from both the outside and the inside, all while trying to save his village.“This is what I brought you here for. This is your purpose. To defend our clan from our enemies. Fight well. Fight until the last drop of blood. Do not falter and do not hesitate. Remember, should any of you fall, as long as the battle is won, you will return to life again. This I vow to you, in Nihilator’s name.”
Overall I really enjoyed this book. All of the character development, world-building, and game mechanics mixed together created an amazing experience for me. One of the things that I enjoyed about this book is that no matter what was happening, you always had a clear goal. Get stronger, build up the village, survive the oncoming attack, and protect the village. All while continuing to develop some of the established characters.
Sadly this didn't provide much character development on people that weren't Oren, Vic, Tika, Zuban, Tal, and Hoshisu. The rest of the clan just had a bit of an upgrade when it comes to their skills, but no overall development. I get that the author wanted to introduce the new cast, but I wanted to see more of the Green Piece Clan. It also did have some plot holes that left me wondering where this is going to go. But since this is a 6 book saga, this means I still have 4 more books to look for explanations.
4.25 out of 5 stars. -
Its got it all
Length!
Action!
Romance!
Twists!
And, honestly? Its a shining example of the best of this genre. Read it in its infancy on RRL, reread the first two days ago. This one was worth the money. Cant wait for book 3! -
4 stars, Great series, really enjoying it.
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Notes:
I may up to 4 stars. It was much better than first book but still had pacing issues. -
3.49☆
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In this sequel to the very enjoyable Life Reset, Oren, Dread Totem of his monster community, Green Piece, has a new and serious challenge on the horizon—the player characters are coming after him. The same group of players who betrayed him in the first novel have figured out where he is and are coming to finish the stealing everything Oren has created in the game and author, Shemer Kuznits, has cleverly managed to make this a real world crisis in addition to a gaming one.
To understand this, we need to take a step back and look at a few unique features in this gaming environment. Because of the enormous popularity of the New Era Online (NEO) gaming system, many of the top players actually make a living in the real world off the game. The most important part of this real world income revolves around “Prime” skills which are owned by the player who first thinks to create them. So if your player has made a new spell it becomes a “Prime” skill which he can give to other players and many times the skills are sold to other players. When Oren’s “friends” betrayed him they were trying to steal from him dozens (or maybe more than dozens) of prime skills that allowed him to live a comfortable life in the real world based on his gaming. In addition, Oren had built the most successful guild in the game (the Manipulators) which also added to both his game and real world wealth. Without Oren managing the guild and making all of these prime skills available to his guild members, the Manipulators are falling apart and all of this wealth is about to be lost to the people who stabbed Oren in the back. So the bad guys have developed a plan to save themselves: find Oren in the game, destroy his new goblin town, kidnap him and torture him in game until he agrees to use all his prime skills for their benefit. They have figured out that Oren, because of a glitch in the system that occurred in book 1 can’t log out anymore and so could literally be tortured forever. Notice how smoothly Kuznits has taken an in game rivalry and bumped it up into serious real world evil.
To protect himself (and eventually get his own vengeance by destroying the Manipulators so that he breaks the wealth of the betrayers) Oren has to build up the power of his goblin/hobgoblin/ogre community. This is the heart of the book—Oren learning to manipulate the system like the pro he is to permit him to take relatively weak monsters and boost them to a power level that will let them best some very high level characters. Kuznits does this very well, but it’s basically what he did for the vast majority of the first book and that part of the plot didn’t hold my interest this time. Fortunately, he has added some new subplots which did keep me intrigued. Oren is in danger of going native—forgetting that he’s really a human and not a goblin. There are some new players joining the game as monsters and one of them is clearly working for the Manipulators. Oren needs these players help to defeat his old guild, but can’t trust them. Also, his patron demon/god who wants to escape to cause the apocalypse is getting more powerful and closer to breaking out of prison. Again, Oren needs the power this creature is feeding him, but every success that Oren achieves brings Armageddon closer to fruition.
There is a lot to like about this book and the last fifth or so is all devoted to a mighty battle that everyone who’s played a computer roleplaying game will love working their way through to see how Oren bests a far superior force of player characters. That being said, I found myself skimming through many sections in the middle where Oren was building up his town and NPCs. I realize these scenes were important to the overall plot, but I think Kuznits could have trimmed this section down quite a bit and we’d have had a tighter, more action-packed novel. That being said, the last chapter lays out a lot of plot threads that have me looking forward to book 3.
If you liked this review, you can find more at
www.gilbertstack.com/reviews. -
4 Acid-Spitting Killer Rabbits Stars
Life Reset: Enviros vs. Player is the second novel in the New Era Online series by Shemer Kuznits.
First and foremost: The lack of that final star in my rating is due mostly towards the situation regarding the traitor/spy in their ranks. Especially the way in which Oren handle (or more accurately mishandled) his reaction to the betrayal in their midst. One: getting fed up with a single players attacks on the GreenPiece Clan he set them all away at a pivotal moment in the battle against Zatras’ forces. Two: he neglected placing contingencies or in anyway preparing to counteract in any future sneak attacks, especially during the battle, which cost his clan greatly. It doesn’t seem reasonable for such a tactician, when taking into account his immense personal and character growth. So many misgivings for Kuznits in this area, it doesn’t fit Oren’s character and definitely detracts from the overall story.
Outside of this, this book is practically perfection. An amazing continuation of the first book. I enjoyed the first half, in that we got to spend more time with Malkyr and Hoshisu outside of general background development. It was somewhat upsetting that Oren let his goblin instincts get in the way of a crucial beneficial relationship/alliance he could’ve built with the dwarfs. Honestly, if that had occurred it would have added further depth to the story, outlining more momentous change on the game mechanics.
The second half of the book, focusing on defending against the incoming siege of players Vatras enlisted. While also introducing more player allies into the story including my favorite party, The Mob Squad. Which I hope we see much more of in the coming books. Especially Raystia, because she’s opening up interesting new aspects, like her flower based type of alchemy experimentation mentioned at the end there.
I wonder how horribly Oren’s attempt to ally with the hob city is going to go?
And what can we expect once Nihilator is freed? -
Again with the "boyish grins" and other too-frequently-repeated similar phrases.
At times I seriously disliked Oren in this book and, like his purple-cloaked VI companion, wanted to strangle him or something in hopes of knocking some sense into him. I'm pretty sure that was intentional on the author's part, though, so A+ characterization on that point.
I liked several of the new player characters introduced in the story. I'll admit, I didn't see the twist with the culprit coming and was surprised in a good way. This book nicely sets up the conflict and plot of the next book while still standing well on its own. Now that we're past the low-level grind of Book 1, the conflicts and battles are bigger and better than ever. The huge array of supporting characters kept things interesting when Oren was at his most infuriating.
The best part of this book, hands down, was the climatic battle. Like the first book in the series, I listened to this book at 1.25x speed, so while that likely contributed a bit to the sense of urgency and fast-paced intensity of the battle, I think a larger part of that feel came from the author's talent at writing large-scale conflicts and fight scenes. More than anything else, that's where the author really shines, and it was that talent that kept luring me back into the narrative.
To be fair, we did see a fair amount of character growth from Oren in this book, and at least some of his more annoying habits are strongly suggested to be a byproduct of playing a goblin character, and thus no more his fault that you can blame any of the seeded(/enslaved) VI's for their character's actions.
Still, if I hear the phrase "some days it was good to be Chief" one more time...
Edit: When I reread this after posting, I realized I called Oren infuriating multiple times in this review. I've toned that down a bit, but I still stand by my assessment of his character. <3 -
Although main character Oren, is becoming an over-powered (OP) "monster" Goblin Totem Lord, his low intelligence and lack of instinct to detecting betrayals lost him his Guild, his player character, and a lot of the buildings and citizens of his Goblin Village Green Piece Clan.
Author does not repeat and comment everything as he did on the first volume. This second volume moves a little bit faster, Vatras and his "enemies" sent level 20-40 players from his old guild. Sent "spies to destroy and weaken the Goblin Village, Green Piece. Although it takes author six volumes to complete this fantasy VRMMORPG (Virtual Reality, Massively Multi-player Role Playing Game).
Oren is still being manipulated by the lawyers of New Era Online, NEO. Author makes no effort to protect Oren's user rights, at all. Oren as time passes loses his "humanity". Each time accepts his "monster" alternate reality world. Oren, main character does not take advantage of all of the spells and abilities that he used to have as a 200 level player. Does not take advantage of the abilities and "cheats" that he has as a "monster-NPC" (Non-player-character). Main Character, Oren, is naive and not that intelligent. Spends most of his time delegating his authority instead of getting rid of his enemies. Author makes main character weak and gullible.
If playing a VRMMORPG as a NPC is the main plot of this fantasy novel series, the author places a lot of contradictory and nonsensical details and actions which destroy, slow down, and weaken the plots.
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