REVIEW: The Gate of the Feral Gods (book) by Matt Dinniman

The Gate of the Feral Gods is LitRPG, the fourth book in Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Everybody's on the fifth floor now, "The Bubbles." The remaining crawlers have been divided into groups of about 150 per bubble, with each bubble containing four zones, or quadrants, into which the 150ish crawlers are further divided. Some effort has been made to divvy up crawlers in such a way that all the powerful ones aren't grouped in the same bubble. Crawlers in one quadrant can't enter another quadrant until they've taken the castle located in their quadrant. Also, a bubble won't pop, and its stairs to the sixth floor won't be accessible, until all four castles in the bubble have been taken.

Carl, Donut, and Katia quickly discover that they're likely the most competent and certainly the highest level crawlers in their quadrant, "Air." They're in a relatively small desert location and will somehow have to work with the few other crawlers around them (some of whom are drunk and determined to stay that way) to capture their quadrant's castle, which is held up by balloons way, way high up in the air. If they're lucky, the crawlers in the other three quadrants in their bubble will figure out how to take their own castles. If they're not, Carl, Donut, and Katia will have more work ahead of them after the Air quadrant. They only have 15 days to pop their bubble and get to their stairwells.

This series continues to be lots of fun. In this volume in particular, the story expands beyond "what's the gimmick on this level?" and allows readers more glimpses of the machinations outside the World Dungeon.

The teamwork elements I enjoyed in the previous volume were back with a vengeance, just with a lot more limitations added. While it was fun to see Carl figure out how to integrate other crawlers' abilities into his plans, and I hated that there were so many interesting sounding developments happening in bubbles and quadrants Carl and Donut weren't in, I also appreciated the forced hiatus Carl and Donut went through partway into this level. It made Carl a little less "special," seeing that other crawlers around him could grow and come up with successful plans without him around.

As aggravating as Quan Ch was, it occurred to me that he and Carl were kind of two sides of the same coin. Quan Ch caused absolute havoc in the previous level, killing who knows how many other crawlers, his entire focus on his own survival. Carl caused similar havoc in this level (potentially worse, what with the "extinction level" event), but once he realized it, he focused on saving as many other crawlers as he could. Still, I could imagine there were crawlers out there absolutely pissed at the way his actions interfered with their own efforts. 

My biggest complaint about this volume would probably be about the sex jokes. They were present in the previous volumes, but they annoyed me a little more this time around for some reason. The hamsters in particular were...a lot. Granted, that was the bonus "Backstage at the Pineapple Cabaret" stuff, but still. The whole sex doll storyline also made my skin crawl.

Anyway, moving into the next volume, there are a lot of new moving pieces, and I'm both looking forward to it and dreading some of it. And I can't talk about any of it here because, ugh, it's all spoilers.