Stijn

Definitely worth your time

Basic concept: System Apocalypse where all humans got an infinite solo tutorial ‘till they died. The top 1 million get reset to lvl 1 with bonuses based on tutorial performance and get isekaied together with other races to a trial planet where their performance will decide the future of the rest of humanity.
Pros:
- Great power system
- World is actually tough. MC isn't steamrolling everything after 5 pages
- Interesting story
- Well written
- Romance subplot.

Cons:
- This book does the “Character knows more than the reader” thing and imo it doesn't really work and made the start more frustrating than it needed to be.
- Not a fan of the murderer plot line as it seems to only remove characters who would've been interesting later on.
- Tying into that, Frederic needed more work and seemingly went from a major character to completely forgotten
- First “zone” takes too long.

Can't wait for the rest to release

Felt rehashed.

Everything in this book has been done before in this series. We've already had the “Kelsie and Max are linked” fight, we've already had the “young master betrayal and rescue of the damsel” arc (with exactly the same characters no less)

This entire book felt predictable and boring. Every single character having the same juvenile 15y/o personality doesn't help.

I really enjoyed the first 2 books and was looking forward to this one, but this was honestly just shit.

I don't mind the idea of murder mystery , but it was in no way compelling enough to carry a full book and the conclusion - the one part that might have been interesting - isn't even here. This entire storyline should've been completed around the 50% mark after which we could've finally explored the world.

This book does not progress the main story, has no power or skill progress and has no worldbuilding. Wouldn't be surprised if this one ends up being fully skippable once more of the series releases.

Not a huge fan of this one.

First 50% of the book are very slow and dry. We follow multiple characters who are just straight cultivating/gaining power without any real purpose or goal.

After that we get into the big conflict with The Runesmith and The Chainbreakers. My main problem here is that they're just not very good bad guys. The Chainbreakers are all completely forgettable, using borrowed power to somehow be relevant. Even The Runesmith himself feels more like a dipshit protected by a lot of plot armor rather than an all powerful bad guy and sadly it seems like he's sticking around.

Zach is still a self righteous loser. His allies keep getting hurt because of him, while he keeps trying to save his enemies and noone calls him out on his bullshit.

I'm dropping the series halfway through this one.

The characters do not evolve. No matter how many times otherwise reasonable characters get their face rubbed into the fact that “the light” is just as bad and corrupt as “the dark”, if not worse, they keep parroting the same “dark bad” bs. It's been established they're not NPC's, our MC cannot be the single sentient being with a working brain. We're 5 books in now, fcking move on.

The pacing is also a mess with endless different pov chapters that serve absolutely no purpose at all. I found myself skipping chapters on end just to actually get back to the main storyline.

Promising start, but after the first dungeon (about 50% into book 1) it turns into a directionless mess. Made it halfway through book 2 with nothing really happening before dropping this.

This series has always been somewhat slower paced, but this was downright boring.
I'm pretty sure you'll be able to go from book 7 straight into 9 without really missing anything. I don't mind a break between adventures, but 730 pages is a bit much

Frustratingly slow paced.

After 4 books we're at the point where I'd expected us to be around book 2. We're in exactly the same location, with exactly the same characters and exactly the same powers. The main “Silverbark” story arc of this book doesn't even get finished. For some reason there just seem to be 2 chapters missing to wrap that up. No cliffhanger, just gone.

I like what this story is trying to do, but the pacing just kills it.

Cleaner writing than book 1, not as boring as book 2 and setting up an interesting Earth storyline for the next books.
It's not there yet, but this series has a lot of potential. I'm looking forward to the next one.

My least favorite one so far

The MC has gotten too far ahead of the pack. None of his allies are “companions”, he's just carrying around sidekicks. This was getting a bit annoying in book 2 and I was hoping earth would be more interesting. Instead pretty much nothing had happened on earth yet. No factions, no competition, no leftover corrupt governments. Only level 1 humans while our MC is sitting at level 100.

The tower was interesting as a tutorial area for book one, but no matter how well the combat and the progression are written, zones with no impact on the story and only throwaway characters can only stay interesting for so long. By book 2 it had overstayed its welcome for me and now it looks like we're going back for book 4, so I'm not a fan of where this series is going.

• Writing seems worse
  - Depressed Jason was interesting for a bit, but it's been 5 books, get over it.
  - Not much happens story wise
  - Banter is still fun and is honestly the only reason I'm still sticking with the series

Review for the series so far:
In General: well written isekai litRPG with MC being a healer bound to do no harm as an interesting twist. Characters are well done and I'm a sucker for the stupid mango jokes.

Books 1 through 7 are just solid litrpg. You have the healer mc, working through the world, getting stronger. Action takes an interesting twist with MC being a healer, but it works great.

In book 8 we have a timeskip and suddenly the entire series turns into full slice of life romcom. No more action, no more plot, progression becomes pretty much an afterthought. Book 11 seems to get a bit more interesting by the end, so I'm still sticking with the series for now.

Books 1-7: 3.5/5
Books 8-11: 2/5

Pretty boring overall

- Incredibly slow, unsatisfying and inconsistent progression.
- 1 very annoying main side character
- World/universe-building hints at being interesting, but as of book 6 we've not seen a lot of it.

Progression here is just all over the place. It can take anywhere from months with thousands of kills to a day of grinding to gain a level. At some point it seems like we have 0 progress to then suddenly have our MC open his stat screen and show he's leveled up 3 times.
Early on we get introduced to random plants and food giving stat increases, but that system just seemingly disappears. System rewards pretty much only exist in the first book and are also mostly forgotten after that.

All side characters except for Abby are pretty good, especially Pudge starting from book 5, sadly that's also the start of multi POV which isn't done very well.

Cool series, rough start.

So I almost dropped this during the first book. The writing is rough, the mc annoying, the progression slow and nothing special...

BUT I stuck with it for a bit and every book this series gets better. Books 4 & 5 have great and interesting characters, the plot has become interesting, the worldbuilding is improving...

Glad I stuck with this and looking forward to the next one.

Okay powerfantasy series.

Book 1 is okay, but the tower really overstays its welcome. Books 2, 3, 4 basically have no plot. It's just the MC soloing dungeon floors and nothing really happening. There's no “city floors” with some interaction with the other competitors, no in person interaction with the outside, no revenge plot against the gods, nothing... There's no goal except clearing 1000 floors. Just the Mc fighting endless nameless monsters on his own.

So in this book we're ditching 7 books of world- and side character-building. This could have been a brave decision, to explore a new world... if we didn't go into a 2 book long budget Harry Potter school arc, with no purpose or plot.

About 80% of books 7 & 8 is fully skippable. Walls of text on potential classes, magic systems, creatures,... none of which we will ever encounter.

Iona and Elaine finally meet, but other than that nothing really happens here.

Decently written and interesting premise, but just plain boring.

Premise: MC starts off as the last remaining human, slaying high ranked monsters by the hundreds and he gets send back in time to try and save humanity.

Now instead of doing anything cool or interesting, he joins his local researcher group to gently speed up the process of humanity figuring out how the system works... and that's it. Neither the MC nor the side characters have any personality, there's no character development, the plot doesn't really move other than the first chapter, MC gets marginally ahead of the power curve, but doesn't want to stand out, so doesn't really do anything interesting... It's just boring.

Half the book are summaries of what happened 5 chapters earlier, combined with this entire being more of a setup for which is to come makes for a boring read.

The big reunion... except that the reunion only happens 50% into the book and everything around it is annoying filler.

My 2 cents on the series so far (books 1-9)

So the basic premise here won't be surprising for those familiar with the genre. Guy gets sucked into different world. There's a system, stats, skills, magic,... and the MC is somehow special.

Books 1-5: very average litrpg stuff with promise but lots of issues. The writing and pacing are decent, but the MC has very little agency and just gets thrown from clusterfuck to clusterfuck for 5 books straight.

Starting from book 6 however the author seems to suddenly have listened to this feedback and decides to fix most of that. Things slow down a bit, MC gets to take a breather between fights to consolidate his gains and he starts actually making decisions himself instead of just being along for the ride.

5 books is a long time to stick with a series before it gets good, but I'm glad I did.

Our MC got isekai'ed into a new world and at the start of the book he's retiring after fighting a war for 10 years. Now he's got a quest to save the world from the apocalypse by being a farmer.

So the TLDR for this series is: Beware Of Chicken with more focus on the overreaching story but less charming characters.

It's well written, decently paced and the plot is interesting.
Fun read

This would have been an amazing read if it was 400 pages long. The pacing is just a mess. Lots of bloat, characters endlessly repeating themselves, completely pointless conversations,....

Maybe it's because I started this right after Cradle, but this one felt like a slog to get through and I found myself beginning to skim entire chapters looking for the point where anything actually started happening. (It's the last 100 pages fyi)

3.5/5 for the series as a whole.

Surgecaller is very heavily inspired by Cradle. You've got the weak shunned MC who discovers the region he grew up in was the weakest in the world. The endgoal is set early on and the entire series is working towards it.

In general it's pretty good. I have 2 issues that hold it back.

1. The MC isn't great. Unlike Lindon, Huon is mostly an annoying brat. He doesn't gain power through talent or incredible hard work, he just gets it handed to him and still whines about it. He also doesn't have much of a personality and his powers are very generic. Nothing unique here

2. The powersystem isn't great or consistent. “It takes years to go from tier 1 to 2, or 1 random pill created from 1 random encounter”. You can gain completely overpowered abilities from random monsters, but barely anyone seems to look for them. Just doesn't make much sense

Book 1: great system apocalypse adventure
Books 2 & 3: lack of direction/focus

So this is a weird one. At its core we have a completed well written system apocalypse story with a card based progression system... and it stays that way for about 50% of the first book. Then we get gods, portals, runes, time travel, cultivation,...

There's about 5 series' worth of ideas jammed into these 3 books and that leads to the story becoming a bit of a mess. We have great worldbuilding, characters even full progression systems and we spend a lot of time on some of those... to then completely forget them couple of chapters later.

Overall I really enjoyed the first one, 2nd and 3rd were still a decent read but had some problems.

If you're a sucker for the whole “MC comes back to his starting point where he's now a god” thing, this one is great.