| Title | : | The Hobgoblin Riot (Dominion of Blades, #2) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | - |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Kindle Edition |
| Number of Pages | : | 587 |
| Publication | : | First published April 13, 2018 |
CLUSTERF*CK
clus·ter·f*ck
\ ˈklə-stər-ˌfək \
vulgar slang. Noun.
1) a disastrously and utterly mishandled situation or undertaking.
2) Popper’s scouting mission to Castellane.
It was supposed to be a simple scouting mission. In and out. No fighting. No new quests. Just me, my hippocorn Alice, and a few hired mercenaries. We were going to tiptoe into the Spiral, get the info we needed, and leave. You know, the Spiral? That tower defense run that protects the hobgoblin capital from invaders?
Easy, right? Nobody would even know we were there.
Yeah, so about that…
The Hobgoblin Riot (Dominion of Blades, #2) Reviews
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Absolutely hate books when a author decides to pull on guilt strings over, over and over again to gain some semblance of favor towards a character or in this case characters. All the characters are broken mentally and have major physiological issues that keeps droning on and on and takes away from the story and the story stops being fun.
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The first book in the Dominion of Blades series has been my entrance to the pure LitRPG world. To summarize, the backstory, the characters, the gameplay and the feeling of "i have to find out what happens next" was awesome.
After reading it, I was eagerly waiting to see how will the author continue the series...
The second book, The Hobgoblin Riot, picks up where the first one stopped. The writing style has changed a bit, taking a "Game of Thrones" approach of telling a story from the first person view of each of the main characters. There is also a good explanation for it, so i liked it! What could have been done is to maybe shuffle and alternate those notes a bit more, just to add another point to the suspense...
The quality of the back story is still top notch. The world, the races, the plot and the quests are fantastic. There is an excellent balance on the given level of information details vs the information saturation. The key is to put just a right amount so that the book is made enjoyable to read, and at the same time to have enough depth. This is something which I unfortunately fail to see in some other books of the same genre. Here, I can feel that lots of thought has been given into each of the quests, characters and story movements. This is what motivates me to read it.
The best part from the first book was reading those bolded game notifications when something important happens to the character. They bring so much fun as they could range from the simple notification to the life changing character information. It is similar here. When turning the pages, I caught myself scanning the new page quickly just to see if there is some important message coming up... Level of suspense is amazing.
I also liked the idea and the central plot, the book is similar but still different than the first one, in a good way. We also find out more about the players themselves which makes it even more interesting. Another chapter of the book is closed, but of course, the new questions are set and left unanswered.
Again, I will be waiting for the next book in the series and hope that the author will manage to make it last (maybe release more than a trilogy).
One more thing. When I am looking for a good fantasy book, I also look at the front cover. The picture has to show some artistic approach to the story, and have some quality into it. The first book contains a logo (i liked the cover) and this one shows the imagined character of Poppy with her pet Alice. Nice! I hope to see other characters from the author's imagination.
To summarize, this book gives exactly what I am looking for in LitRPG genre. My rating is 4.5 out of 5 stars, so I will be rounding it up as I like the series very much. Highly recommended for the lovers of the genre! -
Mini-Review:
1st) Ignore the story blurb and dive into the story. The only thing you need to know is that a good portion of it will be a little like a tower defense game.
2nd) Yay for more information about the "real" world.
3rd) Nice follow up to the first book and mostly reasonable leaps of power for the main trio and friends. I enjoyed the ending sequences a lot and hope the next book will come out within a year.
Fun LitRPG series with engaging characters. It's one of the better stories within this offshoot genre. -
Fantastic book and I am not just saying that because of the name. I am writing up a full review for my blog
https://thebloggoblin.com -
God I love this story. Dominion of Blades has the perfect amount of Stakes, Game Mechanics, World Building, and Character Development. Every main character, even the NPC ones, are dynamic and sympathetic. The Game Mechanics aren't just 'shoot fire ball' 'shoot bigger fire ball' ' shoot even bigger fire ball' and are actually interesting in variety and use, the world outside the game is interesting (if a bit preachy at one point), and the stakes are high for not only the main characters, but the human race.
So, this book splits from being Jonah focused and is spread between all the other main characters, with a slightly heavier focus on Poppy and a slow drip exploration of his/her back story. While it is a bit cliche, it's does a good job of establishing him as more of multi-dimensional character. (though I'm not a fan of the Brooklyn accent personally). You also get some great explanation of the world, the mission, and why things are happening by the end, highlighting why what they are doing is so important.
Great series, 5/5, can't wait for the next one. -
Outstanding
In a world filled with simple plots, thin story lengths, and shallow characters, this book (and series) stand as outstanding examples of rich content. Not only is the story complex, but the characters have real depth and personality. Add to that a story length that far exceeds the episodic novellas that dominate, and you have an incredibly good read. Finally, the story remains very true to the genre, and is edited superbly.
If you’re a SF and/or gamelit fan, then you *really* need to read these books. Excellent stuff. -
3 / 5
The Hobgoblin Riot (THR) is the continuation of the story that started in Dominion of Blades. DoB is a great LitRPG book that introduced me to the LitRPG genre and made me love it. So THR is the second book in that story... and also the third according to the author. And to be honest, I thought this was a trilogy and it was the end of the story arc but it's not! We know there's at least one more book coming out but we're not sure when...
Coming to my review and critique, there's a lot in common with my review of the first book, DoB. You can read
my review here!. So what are the differences then?
Positives:
+ Lots of secondary characters and NPCs that actually matter and are very interesting. In the first book, only the 3 protagonists mattered. Here, the book has so many interesting secondary that sometimes it's hard to keep track of!
+ Interesting reveals about the RL parallel plot. Can't say much more though in order to avoid spoilers.
Negatives:
- It's all defense... If defensive football, basketball and generally turtling strategies don't appeal to you then stay away. Other reviewers say it's mostly a tower defense game and they are not really far off. .. because it is!
- The pace is all over the place. Especially the middle part was very uneven and boring and slow. Bleargh!
- The constant switching of POVs does not really help things. Ok, we get to know the main characters better but this is at the expense of plot progression.
- The ending (or lack of!) was very disappointing and it felt very rushed! The last 20-30 pages read as if they were hastily put there just to make a deadline.
In conclusion, if you liked the first book, it's worth reading this one too, just to get to the next part of the story. If you didn't love the first then you'll probably like this one even less. I will read the next one when it comes out but with a lot of reservations.
Conditionally recommended!
3 / 5 -
I honestly don’t know what the hell happened. I’ve never read a series where the quality of the writing has declined so sharply from book 1 to book 2. The characters were there, the plot was solid, the premise was fantastic, and the writing was so bad… Repeated words everywhere (not in the typo sense, the ‘I have no thesaurus’ sense), insanely repetitive sentence structure in almost every paragraph, and so much telling transformed the series from one I really enjoyed into something I won’t bother to finish. If anyone edited the novel, they should look for a new career as quickly as possible. Seriously, the writing was actually that bad. I found myself rereading almost every single sentence in my head in order to change the flow / line edit on the fly, trying to make it bearable because I enjoyed the story—and that sucks.
Also, the whole format of doing the book in “notes” and constantly head jumping from one character to the next was kind of terrible. It simply didn’t work. An easy 3rd person limited POV would have done just fine, and it would have carried the story through the character location splits without issue. At the end of the day, the bad outweighs the good. I’m just disappointed. -
Dull start but decent end
I really struggled with the first, I wanna say, 60% of this book. It felt like a real slog to get through and I feel the way the information (it felt like information rather than story) was doled out wasn't as good as the first book.
The real meat of the actual story happens in the last 30% after all that info is set up, but considering the premise is that this book is a collection of notes detailing past events, I feel the set up vs the story pacing could have been handled differently.
It was very disappointing to have to wait so long in to feel like the story was actually progressing, but with that said, I'm now soo intrigued by the ending that I do want to pick up the next book. Hopefully the pacing issues will be ironed out -
Two books mashed into one did not a good storytelling make.
"My original intention was to have the action of Books 2 and 3 happen at the same time. One would be from Popper’s point of view, and the other would be from Jonah’s. As I came to the end of the first draft of Book 2 way back in August of 2017, it became clear that wasn’t going to work. As a result, I’ve combined the two." Authors Note.
The result is pretty damned annoying to read. Not bad as content, but the transitions between viewpoints tend either to blur together or force you to take non-sequential trips. Also, ending get's several sort of shades confusing and i can only guess that most of the dramatis personae suffer from some sort of mental trauma. -
Piles of undead chasing the main character because of his curse, taking over a kingdom, and deciding to have one of his people go and investigate another kingdom.
While having his magical advisor open up the gate, when his friend steps through he is drafted into a world event that requires him to defend the city.
Quick and easy like the magical advisor helps the king through the portal. He too is drafted, and cut off from his kingdom.
For the rest of the book its like a castle defense game with traps, and a long path the invaders have to travel through. 5 waves and the boss of the final wave, defeated by a level 1 spell.
We do find out a bit more about whats going on with the ship saboteurs but, thats mostly in passing in the epilogue. -
The book continues where the first one left off, and was a good continuation of the story. The world building is very well done and has a ton of LITRPG elements. This story essentially takes place in a tower defense battle. It is also told as individual books by each character, but it works since their voices stay the same. We do get some more story on the ship and what is happening, but this book felt longer than it probably should have. The narration was better this time. I received this book for free for my honest review.
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4.5 stars
Super action packed - it's one thing after another. I should feel fatigued by how much happens, all the twists and turns, but somehow I wasn't. I needed to know how they were going to get out of this mess.
Though looking at how long it took me to read it - maybe I was fatigued! Haha oops. To be fair, I did pick up a new game and got a bit obsessed with it. -
This book is full of weaponized plot holes and expositional crimes against humanity, but also largely-unforgettable characters and awesome RPG-based battles. You remember all the whacky characters in Shrek and Toy Story? That's the type of character roster you can look forward to. Except they're all grown up, sexually active and ready to talk shit. That book cover with the little girl Chucky and a purple hippo/unicorn? That's only a small taste of the kind of shennanigans.
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Wheeeee
While the first book came primarily from one character’s perspective, this one shot between several. The voice change wasn’t perfect, but it was interesting to see this take on the events from multiple perspectives. The characters have gotten WAY powerful, and it’s clear there are more powers to come. Some of the side characters have hinted at the future, but I don’t know what will come to pass.
And there is still the problem solving happening outside of the “game world”. In a lot of books, that stuff seems irrelevant, but it’s tied in nicely here. -
More Twisted Than A Dozen Pretzels!
The plot line, the characters, and the traps are all more convoluted than dozen pretzels. This novel, the second in a series, delves deep into the history and psyche of the three main characters -- Jonah, Poppy/Popper, and Gretchen. All three are far more complex than the preceding novel had revealed.
This series may appeal to fans of the wider Fantasy genre and to those who enjoy playing RPGs. -
As ever Matt Dinniman creates a wonderful and immersive storyline and world, I feel so attached to the characters and invested in their story and their struggles.
This instalment in the series sees twists and turns and betrayals and surprises that I didn’t see coming.
Looking forward to the next in the series! -
Book two
Well that was a fun book.
Questions were answered, many remain.
Will our heroes save the ship?
Will the bad guys be punished?
Some are, some remain.
I look forward to book three.
I recommend this book. -
I really liked this one. It was a bit long, but there wasn't a whole ot wasted material here, it was fairly well done, and makes an excellent second book in the series. I'm sure there's more to come, so I'll be keeping an eye out for them.
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Another superb novel
Fantastic sequel to the first book. Can’t wait for the next one. There’s a seamless and necessary link between the real world and the game world. Love this writer! -
I thought this was to be the last book, but alas! However I feel the ending is simple enough to understand and give some closure, though the author has a lot of freedom to go to many different places from here.
I really like the author's style! -
A rollercoaster of events
Thoroughly recommend this series. I think there’s more to come, but.....
I could do with another instalment. It’s a rollercoaster of events compacted into a few seconds of life of passengers on the Hibiscus 🌺
