I talked just a few days ago about how I’ve been in a severe reading slump lately. That same day, I picked up Apocalypse Gates: Book 1: Rapture" by Daniel Shinhofen. Amazon Link The book’s summary was interesting enough. Guy wakes up after his brain is basically stolen by mega Corp Inc and uploaded to a video game. I love me some LitRPG, so I figured this would be a fun little romp. I really didn’t expect to get into it as much as I did. This book is pretty good in a lot of places. It’s also really bad in some places, so much so that it kind of ruins it, but we’ll get to that later.

Premise⌗

Alvin is our main character. He’s not a good guy, really. He was brought up in the foster system and it wasn’t a great experience for him. Somewhere along the line, he managed to sign some form of legal document giving a Cryogen company permission to store his brain after his death. The problem was, this company went out of business and managed to sell the rights to Alvin’s brain to some gaming company. When Al died, his brain was uploaded to a game called Apocalypse Gates.

If the name didn’t give it away, this is a story about zombies. I’m not a big zombie guy, really. I damn near put the book down when I found out, but I slugged on. Because this is a game, there are game elements: a loot system, an experience system where you can spend your XP in a store, and even a snarky AI that leads the way.

Characters⌗

Alvin is sassy, and I love that. I do wish he had a bit more push back on his situation. He basically just goes along with it. He doesn’t have a choice, but dammit if he has no reaction to it whatsoever. That bugged me the entire book. The biggest problem besides that is that Alvin loses a bit of himself near the 3/4 point, when he meets Becky. Becky is an 18 year old Goth chick. That’s really all we need to know about her. She has so little personality that if she wasn’t the main love interest in book 1, I probably would have forgotten her.

She brings out the mushy in Alvin, which is fine, but it removes some of the sass that actually made me like him. They banter back and forth, but it is so repetitive that I skipped whole paragraphs.

There are other characters as well. The book sends Alvin out on story missions where he can gain XP. Along the way, he meets several people. Bill and Susan are the most notable of these. Bill is a bad ass war vet who seems invincible, and is overprotective of his daughter Susan. Susan is a no-nonsense gal who can handle herself. I really wish she had been the main love interest. She had depth and an actual personality. Unlike Becky.

The people that Al meets along the way are important because all of them come back once he enters World Mode. They all become main secondary characters in some form or fashion, and are the pillars of the Settlement that Alvin sets up. They do play a role in moving the game along, I don’t feel as if I’d care if any of them died. That’s usually my indicator if I like a character or not, and none of these people really matter that much to me. Bill would be the only one I’d worry about.

World Mode⌗

Once he gets enough XP, Al unlocks world mode. Basically after that, this story is mostly about grinding for XP and making the settlement as big as possible (more people, more XP). This would have been fine if the author had interspersed some character development outside of romance here and there. I’d have liked to see Bill do more than play the overprotective father. I would have loved to see Al interact more with the pillars of the settlement in ways that wasn’t them going out to loot the town for resources. Some dialogue or some kind of bonding. Anything, really.

As is, when Al leaves at the end of the book, he isn’t very sad about leaving anyone behind. There’s just no connection between him and anyone else beyond Becky. And that’s a crying shame.

Becky⌗

I love romance, and this series caught my eye as it is poly and I enjoy that kind of thing. But the romance in book one is bad. Worse, the smut is horrible. Like, some of the worst I’ve ever read. It adds nothing to the plot, and it is very repetitive. Al and Becky use the same dirty talk every time they have sex, they do things mostly in the same order, and the banter they use to tease each other is used over and over again by both characters. I’m talking verbatim, and often on the same page.

I blame Becky for this. Maybe that’s being unfair, but things were going so well before she hopped into Al’s bed. He had personality and while I wish he was more personable with actual people and not just the AI butler, I enjoyed him as a character. Then Becky comes in and he just falls for her. We get no real bonding between them beyond the supposed kinky sex (which isn’t all that kinky, and often reads like a high school student wrote it hoping to be edgy), and any conversation between them outside of the sack is all about innuendo and “promises” of future kinky sex. It’s so one dimensional, and ruins the last third of the book.

Conclusion⌗

The LitRPG stuff is very good. I enjoyed the grinding for XP, the world building is pretty good though mostly generic apocalypse video game style, and for most of the book I enjoyed Alvin. But it lost stars when the romance started. Becky is so unlikable, it’s hard to read anything else. The smut is so poorly written and adds nothing to the plot that I just skipped most of those scenes after the first six or so. I really wish the author had done more to make Alvin care about the world he was in. As is, it seems he only does things for XP, not because it will save the lives of people he cares about. This makes him seem cold. And that can work in a character if there is some thawing as the book goes on. That doesn’t happen in this book beyond the whirlwind romance of Al and Becky. It makes me sad because the premise was so damn good.

I’m being generous giving it 3.5 stars, and I’ll probably give the series one more chance, but I hope that it gets better.

⭐️⭐️⭐️ 1/2 stars

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