If I hear someone describe a woman as having a “beautiful body” one more I’m going to scream. The writing in this is extremely cringey and the MC is detestable.

The concept is cool.

I sincerely appologise as I could not finish this book. I made it through 40% and while I do like the isekai genre this book was sadly too sexist for me. To be set in the future where the view of females feels like playing WoW in 2011 is rather bleek. Yes I did play WoW a bit back in 2011 as a girl, and I did not play a healer, but just like all the guys playing then thought I should main priest so does the authour write all women in this book. Either they get to be healers, manipulative bitches or practically worthless scouts. Everyone is hot and you'll get to read unnecesseary discriptions of breasts throughout at least the first half of the book, as I cannot speak on the latter parts.

All in all, I know this is writen by a man who's not culturally in the same place as me. Which is disapointing, since I've enjoyed other books written by eastern autours. I will still give it 2 stars, because the fighting was well written and the gaming system, while not revolutionary was well thought out.

A real life quest video game complete with level ups and armor. Zombies. The more zombies you kill, the stronger you get. I wanted to love this book. Everything was there. I mean zombies. The characters reactions to near death and the constant struggle to survive are not believable. The MC is an egomaniac and very ethnocentric. The portrayal of women is misogynistic.

Audiobook Review - To be honest I really liked the description of this title and I really wanted to love it, but it just has too many flaws. The premise is fantastic and original, but for me the delivery fell flat. Too much time is spent with videogame style descriptions of abilities, objects and levels. This really interrupted the flow of the story. I really hated the main character, he thought too highly of himself and I didn't care for the way he treated those around him, especially women. Not recommended for all YA collections.

I think the most important thing to convey is how amazing the world-building was. It's such a wonderful universe to create in such a limited amount of time.

Is the main character a little annoying? Yeah. He's a weeb, and his objectification of women makes me uncomfortable. However, he's still somehow likable. There's nothing amazing about him. He's just a dude.

Overall, a pretty good book.

Exhausting, absolutely exhausting is the only way to describe The Onset. I hate to say it but the truth is I thought this one came off as the fevered rambling dream of a horny teenager. I’ve loved LitRPGs since I first started reading them years ago, but I’ve never read anything that was quite as insanely chaotic and nonsensical as this one. Forget that there is no real explanation as to what has happened to the world. Yes, there is a brief paragraph or two of some alien device or what have you, but it’s never really explained…which honestly I would have been fine if everything else had been done right. Often times the setup for some LitRPGs can be lacking, but if the rest of the story/mechanics are solid it’s easy to forgive and overlook. And since I enjoy post apocalyptic stories and there aren’t a lot of LitRPGs dealing with it, I was more than willing to give the opening a pass. If only that were the only weak point. Where to start? Forgive me because I’m about the ramble and hop from subject to subject almost as bad as the author…almost. There’s an old writing adage: show don’t tell. Telling is all this author does. Our hero—who, by the way is a narcissistic dork with an overblown ego and massive delusions of grandeur—would go into battle...and this is how it would be described: I killed 100 zombies, then a few more. Some were harder than others. No one reacts anywhere close to how you’d expect people to act in an apocalypse. The story itself had zero focus…no actual structured goal, it just goes from one ramdon event to the next…quite honestly it is as if he were relaying various segments of half remembered dream sequences. Any and every female character is pretty much described by her boobs. Yes, boobs is his preferred word choice and he uses it every chance he gets. Now lets talk about the RPGs mechanics. Skills, levels, classes, and gear are staples of the LitRPG genre, and it’s clear that Boris is a big fan of these things, to the point where (and I am not exaggerating here) I’d say 50% or more of the book is spent just randomly mentioning the things they find. I’m not kidding when I say that more skills and gear where mentioned in the opening 15-20% of this book than in the last six LitRPGS I’ve read combined. The author obsesses about these things, talking about finding the gears/skills, trading the skills and gear, holding the skills and gear. He loads out that horrible main character with more powers and skills than the entire roster of the X-Men. Seriously it’s as if he would throw in any insane idea that crossed his mind, no matter how nonsensical it might seem. And then there is the time factor. Time in this universe makes no sense whatsoever. Within an hour and a half of the apocalypse starting somehow someone out there creates and gets up and running a brand new social media platform…which amazingly everyone still alive just automatically seems to know about and signs up for. And once that little nugget is introduced the idea of survival is pushed to the backseat because apparently survival doesn’t really mean anything unless we can post video and get likes and followers? By the time I reached the end of the book I’m pretty sure less than a week had passed and yet it felt like the apocalypse had been going on forever. I know you’re thinking, if I have so many complaints (and the ones mentioned barely scratch the surface, lol) why did I keep listening? Honestly it’s like a crash on the highway, you want to look away but you can’t. I honestly wanted to see just how insanely off the rails the story would go. How far does it go? Considering the story includes clothing and milk monsters, I’ll let you be the judge. As horrible as the main character is and as insanely bad and nonsensical as the story is, I still couldn’t help but listen. It’s like a movie that is so bad it manages to entertain you, but not in the way the director intended ala Ed Wood. Nick Mondelli’s narration was fine considering what he had to work with. I’m genuinely conflicted as to how to score this one. Can I in good consciousness honestly recommend this? No, not really. And yet I did spend nearly 10 hours listening to it…granted I spent much of that time shaking my head and mumbling about just bad it was, but I kept listening nonetheless so that has to mean something, right? And yet there is a part of me that knows this is just the first book in what I believe is already a 4 or 5 book ongoing series and I can’t help but admit to being interested in knowing what comes next. (Again it’s the idea of it being like a highway crash and that twisted desire to see just how bad it is comes to mind.) I’m going to go with a 2.5 (I’ll begrudgingly round it up to 3 since as I said I did spend nearly 10 hours listening … and was almost unable to keep myself from listening.) I would say just know going in that it has massive…seriously, seriously massive flaws, and if you’re a fan of ‘bad’ movies, you might come out of it being entertained by the absurdity of it all. I’d like to thank Dreamscape Media and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to an advanced audio copy of The Onset.

https://www.amazon.com/review/R1CD2XC6D8Y4M1/ref=pe_1098610_137716200_cm_rv_eml_rv0_rv

No no no no noooooooo. This could have been such a fun story. Instead what I got was a misogynistic, ableist manifesto.

There's not a single woman mentioned in this book whose body isn't analyzed (particularly her breasts). They're all written as weaker and dumber than the men, even going so far as saying things like "do you need a girl?" and constantly having them make food for the MC. They're all written as shallow, nothing other than pretty faces, only there for the MC's pleasure and use. The MC himself is so extremely arrogant, cocky, and just overall annoying that I could barely pay attention to him.

There's also a trans character that is treated really shitty as well. He's described by his breasts, which is the way the MC treats everyone he sees as a woman. He's treated as though he should be useless and misgendered fairly often and just overall regarded with disgust from the MC.

I thought we might get some pretty cool amputee in an apocalypse representation, but that did not happen at all. He's described as less than human after losing his arm and repeatedly is in disbelief that he can do anything at all without that arm. Then they just fix it with a prosthetic that's "better than a real arm."

Almost everything in this book came away with a disgusting take and I ended up just being uncomfortable the entire time. It was extremely disappointing and I would not recommend this to literally anyone. Which is so sad because it has warned me away from litRPG and could have been so awesome for younger readers.

Woah....okay, for real, if we get the zombie apocalypse, I kinda want this one. Real life with video game capabilities and stats? Item drops? Performance attributes, level ups? Sign me up!!!
All except the freakin' mutant rats and zombie rats.
That sh+t can stay far the heck away!

Enjoyed this as an audiobook. Have a feeling all the game stat updates would be super annoying in print. Tended to get lengthy at some points. Also, the narrator sounds like Jesse Eisenberg and I loved it.

I wanted to love this. I really did.

But the main MC was not likeable at all.

I did really like the zombies, the video game level ups, and the actual world building.

I did not like the way any non male character was portrayed.

The narration was fine, the narrator did what they could for this one, so I was able to listen and enjoy some parts of this story.