Equalize

The premise of Earth turning into a harsh game system world is really neat and new to me, at least. I didn't have high hopes for the main character at his introduction: a former professional basketball player and current tabletop and computer gamer. Also his name is Rocky. I grew to like him and his knowledge from both backgrounds is relevant to this new Earth.

The RPG system of this book is very focused on combat skills and classes. There's a lot of fight scenes, mostly very similar, and I found myself skimming over most of them. Noncombat skills exist but few have much relevance. Presumably skinning level 20 is faster than level 1, but it doesn't effect the story any. A kingdom building sort of system is touched upon but will probably be detailed more in future books.

Environmentalism: High
Horniness: Moderate
Power Trip: High, Physical
Testosterone: Occasionally obnoxious

This book could have used another round of edits but is otherwise good.

Audiobook is done by Luke Daniels, so the female lead sounds way older than she probably should, but otherwise all the characters sound okay.

4.5 stars

Basically I love LitRPG.
But this is an another level, the idea of the new world is just wonderful. The ether & Gaia concept is so cool
The 0.5 less stars because, in the beginning it was little harder to get into and also sometimes have unnecessary paragraphs.