TLDR: The videogame announcer voice is so annoying, I’m just gonna read the rest of this series instead of listening to it.
Lets get the good stuff out of the way. The story is good. It’s a modern take on unwilling average Joe is thrust into a crazy situation and becomes a hero. The writing is witty, the setting takes many things from videogames that readers can understand, and there are jokes that are funny to the 18-30 year old crowd of today instead of the 18-30 year old crowd that read Pride and Prejudice when it came out. The narrator is incredible. He has great range, the main character voices are fitting, and he goes out of his way to make many voices distinct.
BUT!!!!
He nails the annoying videogame announcer voice to a T. He uses a robotic voice effect and nails the announcer cadence. It is annoying and grating like so many videogame voices like Claptrap from Borderlands. Now that’s fine in a videogame where you can mute the announcer, or the character is meant to be annoying and you get to beat them up in a silly side quest. It becomes unbearable when I need to sit through 2 minutes of it and parse important story information. He uses the voice a lot and every time it happens when I’m driving, I just think “GOD I wish I could mute this and just read it”.
I like the writing and the story. I like and appreciate the narrator. I hate his robotic announcer voice and I’m gonna be reading the next book instead of listening to it