Pros, the characters feel very well written and the acting is preformed stellarly, incorporating the context of the speech into the recording often which is cool! These are the best parts.
If you’re into it: the references to games, gaming culture, how gamers talk about games is all here. And all pretty faithfully done. This writer gets games, and not just video games but mmos, and tabletop. It’s pretty neat to see.
The meh: games have the same problem. You can’t make your character walking death machines (albeit pretty falible), and then have them be conflicted about killing creatures that show some to a lot of sentience. The book bounces between the horror of the situation, and the nonchalant mess of trying to kill things for views like a game of ping pong, and realistically it doesn’t make much sense. Sure for one of the characters you could understand, but for Carl, it’s pretty inconsistent. And that’s annoying.
Nothing is bad about this book though! Highly enjoyable if you don’t mind the ludonarrative dissonance, but I guess since this is a book, it’s just narrative dissonance.