Monday, October 5, 2015

Book Review: Soda Pop Soldier

Author: Nick Cole

Dust Jacket Summary

Call of Duty meets Ready Player One in this fast-paced, action-packed novel from the author of The Wasteland Saga. Gamer PerfectQuestion fights for ColaCorp in WarWorld, an online Modern Warfare combat sport arena where mega-corporations field entire armies in the battle for real world global advertising-space dominance. Within the immense virtual battlefield, players and bots are high-tech grunts, using drop-ships and state-of-the-art weaponry to wipe each other out. But times are tough and the rent is due, and when players need extra dough, there's always the Black, an illegal open source tournament where the sick and twisted desires of the future are given free rein in the Wastehavens, a gothic dungeon fantasy world. All too soon, the real and virtual worlds collide when PerfectQuestion refuses to become the tool of a mad man intent on hacking the global economy for himself.

Good Points

- the author has to be gamer because the major strength of this novel is how genuine and real the in-game action is played out
- the author also does a great job at describing action so that the reader never feels lost
- the pop cult references are cool

Bad Points

- the real world was underdeveloped
- some situations in the real world read like an action movie and at times, more cartoonish than the gaming events
- too many plot elements are tied up in a nice neat bow

Final Word

When the story involves gaming events it really sings but the sorely underdeveloped real world building drags the novel down and feels a bit tacked on just for effect. However, the author does a stellar job at describing the action and building tension to keep the reader interested to the end of the book.

                                                              My Rating

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