Epic

by Conor Kostick

Grade: 3 stars
Story summary: Erik lives on a world where disputes/economy/practically everything is decided through a huge multiplayer game called "Epic". In frustration after his mother's "death" (character death), he decides to challenge the authorities through a new female character with all her points wasted on beauty. Then follows shenanigans and adventure.

Thoughts: Speaking as someone who enjoys computer games quite a lot, this was quite a lot of fun. Battles and armour and dragons and treasure and strange NPC's.

But also, speaking as someone who enjoys computer games quite a lot, I wish he'd gone into more detail. The idea of a character with max beauty points and almost nothing else was quite fascinating. But then it seemed he just got a few perks, like that special ring, and that was all there was to it. I wanted...training montages! And long descriptions on the inner workings of the game! And comparisons of each character's strengths and weaknesses! And training montages! (I love training montages. I don't care that they're probably overdone. I think every movie should have one. It was my favourite part of X-Men: First Class. It's one of the main reasons why I love Poison Study so much--there isn't exactly a montage, but there's lots of training. And it's awesome.)

In general, there was just not enough. The group of kids went from ordinary players to super-players without much explanation. There were fascinating hints of artificial intelligence, but it never got into it properly.