Review: Heaven's Gate: Volume 1

Heaven's Gate: Volume 1 by DragonTreasures
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Juvenile wish fulfillment

I want to leave an honest review, but first I'll disclose that I didn't listen to the entire book. About three-quarters of the way through, I started to skip chapters. I usually never leave a review for a book I didn't fully complete, so perhaps the last quarter that I skipped was absolutely amazing work and I should feel shamed for not slugging through the entire book. I doubt it, but take that into consideration while reading this.

Heaven's Gate is a perfect example of why I used to think I disliked the LitRPG genre. It's still not my favorite, but Heaven's Gate is more of a juvenile's personal fantasy fulfillment than any kind of real novel. It may appeal to a 13-year old gamer, but for anyone else, it is going to fall short with its arrow-straight plot, simple character development, and overpowered protagonist. The plot itself barely makes sense and the characters often seem to make foolish or unrealistic decisions and actions. Some elements were okay, for example, the dialog wasn't awful and the POV perspective was done decently -- but overall, I would not want to read a second book in this series.

The narration did not help this book -- in fact, it may have hindered it. It's difficult to completely judge it as sometimes bad material can bring down a good narrator, but I don't think Richard's performance was very good. This may be my ethnocentric opinion, but the narrator's heavy accent made it difficult to listen to and felt out of place with the characters (who I do not believe were supposed to be American). However, he did have good voice inflection and did a decent job representing some of the character's (limited) personalities. I'd be willing to give him another try, but I don't think he was a good fit for this book.

This audiobook was given to me for free, and I voluntarily gave this review.

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