In 2043, Capes Online is the biggest, most popular VRMMORPG in the world. With over one billion active players and counting, gamers can become brave Heroes or cunning Villains, their every choice determining their Alignment. Everyone wants to play this game and almost everyone does.Except for 25-year-old police officer Nyle Maxwell, who can’t log out. Killed in a car accident on his first day on … first day on the job, Nyle gets his mind uploaded to Capes Online to save his life. But the one way mind-to-game upload process means Nyle can never return to his physical body in the real world. Nor is he allowed to contact his friends and family outside the game or else he risks deletion by the secretive government organization that put him in the game in the first place.
Things get even worse when a villain known as Dark Kosmos takes over Capes Online not long after Nyle’s arrival. Trapping all of the players in the game and cutting off all contact with the real world, Dark Kosmos targets Nyle for death.
Now Nyle must become a true superhero and save his fellow players from Dark Kosmos while adjusting to his new digital life. All of which would be much easier if he didn’t have a hyperactive sidekick overly fond of puns or if he even wanted to be here in the first place.
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Most LitRPGs novels lock the hero in the game at some point to add tension to the story. The Player Blackout does it a little bit differently. The hero here is a small-town cop who died on his first day on the job. Why he is chosen for an experimental program that uploads brains into a gaming system is one of the mysteries of the story that we are trying to resolve. It’s that connection to the outside world (in this case a real-world mystery) that I really like in LitRPGs—stories where in what happens in the game matters in some way to life outside the game. Of course our hero, Winter, can’t get into the outside world anymore but that doesn’t lessen his interest in it. So this mystery has large potential for the series and I wish that Flint had spent more time developing it in this opening novel.
Over all, there’s tons of potential in this book, but Flint never fully takes advantage of it. For example, the first third of the story where he really needs to grab the reader’s attention is fairly slow moving. Winter is learning the mechanics of the game, but instead of showing him fighting and investigating as a new super, Flint skips most of this and spends his time showing the problems Winter has rescuing a cat from a tree. I’m sure this scene was supposed to be humorous, but it just didn’t work for me. The only other thing of interest that happens in these opening chapters is that Winter learns that a villain named Atmosphere knows his real world identity (which is a secret because his inclusion in the game is part of a top secret government experiment).
I should point out that it was quite obvious who Atmosphere was from the first time his name is dropped, and that his identity doesn’t make any sense. Clearly Flint understands this and has wrapped it into the larger mystery of who arranged for Winter to be downloaded into the game to begin with.
The pace picks up quite a bit when a new villain takes over the gaming world in an apparently unplanned revolution. Dark Cosmos cuts the game off from the outside world so that none of the players can log out, meaning that eventually, unable to eat, the bodies of the players will starve to death. Dark Cosmos offers the players two options to save themselves—kill him (which he claims is impossible) or bring him the low level Winter. Naturally the entire gaming world (pretty much) decides to go after Winter.
This is a great threat that I think Flint should have done more with—harrowing chases, etc. Instead Winter reaches the villain hide out really easily. Here we get some good action as he fights his way to his ultimate confrontation with Dark Cosmos. This last third of the book is by far the best. Yes, Winter continues to be dumb—defeating opponents and then forgetting to finish them off so they can recover and threaten him again, but the overall plot begins to advance. But even here Flint misses a major opportunity to knock his book out of the park. Dark Cosmos has been collecting players (heroes and villains) so he can torture them (because he’s…bad). When Winter needs a distraction at the end of the book, having those players go after Dark Cosmos in a massive powers battle would have been awesome and the (pretty good) battle Flint gives us for the ending could have still been worked in around the army of players trying to bring down the bad guy.
The ultimate ending also left me wanting more. No real progress is made resolving the big mystery of who put all of this in motion by arranging for Winter to be put in the game. Also, apparently no one expects the gaming company to suffer any serious consequences from having almost killed a few million players across the globe by losing control of their gaming system. I would expect every government on earth to start investigating/regulating the company. And I would suspect that a huge proportion of its gamers would never log on again. Saying they have good lawyers to fend off the civil suits seems to me to be a totally inadequate way of dealing with the ramifications of the book.
All of that being said, there’s a lot of potential in this story and Flint’s writing improved the deeper into the novel I got, so I have a lot of hope that the next book will keep getting better.
I got this book free from Audiobookcodes.com in exchange for an honest review.