TL:DR If you liked Ready Player One this might (or not) be for you. Don't get stuck thinking this is a clone of another well-known sf story. The end might be worth the rest. So don't give up just yet ...

I immensely enjoyed [b: Ready Player One|9969571|Ready Player One|Ernest Cline|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1406383612s/9969571.jpg|14863741] precisely for its pop-culture references and gamer content. You get all that again. Maybe even a little too much of it. Despite cool passages, (paraphrased:) "You're a lying bag of shit just like Obi-Wan." / "And you're a whiny bitch just like Luke." Armada managed to leave me cold.

The story takes place in our time, starting with the 18 year old first person narrator Zack Lightman going to school in his hometown Beaverton in Oregon. By day he's a bored student, by night he turns into an elite fighter pilot in the MMO Armada. His (dead) father was a gamer before him, and Zack hero-worships the man he never met. But he's also worried that he might have inherited a few other less cool traits like a penchant for paranoia and hallucinations from him.

Subjectively I'd rate this 2 stars. I had so little fun with this book. But I do realize that I am at fault a little too. Sometimes I read the first 40 pages of a book and something ticks me off, that book turns into a lost cause. The smart thing would be to stop reading but despite recognizing the point at which this happens clearly, usually I want to finish the book just so I can say: "I did it and here's why it is so terrible." So here I am enraged at wasting my time for about 80 percent of the book, and even worse: I kind of liked the end (well most of it).

And I cannot even put my finger on it. The pop-culture references at the beginning are overwhelming and I think that started my whole downward spiral into disliking the book.

Also the first big reveal is very much not a reveal, because it is advertised from about page one and then it takes 100 more pages to get there.

These two facts taken together made for a bad start into the book. It get's better and more unique after that.


For two thirds of the book I felt I was reading a cheap clone of [b: Ender's Game|375802|Ender's Game (The Ender Quintet, #1)|Orson Scott Card|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1408303130s/375802.jpg|2422333]. I kept waiting for the twist, and waited, and waited and all the waiting distracted me terribly from the writing - which is not bad at all - and what was going on in the plot. There are similarities to Ender but the disappointment and distraction I felt at reading a rip-off were purely my own.