As of the time of writing this review, I’ve read all five available books.
Max wanted to be a [Baker].
Settle down, bake stuff, and enjoy life.
The gods, however, ruined that dream.
Given [Baker] and a rare black skill, he is now running for his life, trying to grow strong enough to return home. Now Max must find a way to grow strong enough to survive the people and the god hunting him. Unprepared for an adventurers life, Max will have to learn things the hard way as he hides his secret lest his fellow adventurers turn on him.
Alright, time for some action-packed popcorn reading. Alright, so in good overpowered-MC land, what is Max’s gimmick? As the blurb says, he gets a forbidden black skill, called Consume. So instead of gaining experience from monsters and levelling up, he gets stats and skills from them if he kills them.
Initially you’d think the story is based around the MC going at it solo, but he quickly runs into another adventuring party and teams up with them, which is going strong many books later. This team includes Tanila (elf mage), Batrire (dwarf healer), and Fowl (dwarf tank), with Max taking the off-tank melee-damage-deal also-a-mage-lol scout-and-trap-extraordinare role. Max takes many roles. Max has many skills.
The primary plot line so far involves the world-spanning game the gods are playing with releasing a black skill and altering Max’s threads of fate, with Max knowing that he (and his friends) need to get stronger as quickly as possible, or become perishable pawns in another person’s game.
To get stronger, of course, Max needs to kill things. In the first book, this starts with some monsters in the forest. Then we move into dungeons (with killing a dungeon boss or a rare spawn being rewarded with a chest of loot). There are a lot of dungeons. And then we make it to the capital city which has, you guessed it, more dungeons. And the tower, which has a hundred levels. Every few levels, there’s a boss. The author does skip past a few of these levels (we’re up to about forty floors by the end of book five), but not many of them.
This is good news if you want to read tons of creative fight sequences, from pirate-themed floors, to steampunk mechas, to demonic collessium fights, to mazes and puzzles. The creativity in the fights is impressive, and yet I admit I did find myself skimming them for after book three or so, just because so few of them were plot-relevant. Even with the creative fights, many of the encounters do turn a bit formulaic. Tanila roots/ice prisons some, Cordelia shoots an arrow through someones eye, Fowl rushes in to tank and taunt if needed, and Max stealths and then gets in the thick of it. When push comes to shove and things aren’t going his way, Max can trigger pretty much all his skills at once to do massive damage, and this ends most fights. Obviously it doesn’t work in the plot-relevant and more cinematic fights where the stakes are higher, and those are always fun to read. The arena fights where Max smacks people down were great. Random tower floor 24, not as much.
Still, things seem to be getting mixed up with the ending of book five, where someone trying to get rid of Max has tried another tactic than “Try to use force against a ridiculously strong and tanky fighter,” and I’m very curious to see how the attacker is going to try and remove Max from the picture with unorthodox tactics. Boox six comes out in January as well, so I won’t have long to wait to find out!
For those that enjoy fight-heavy popcorn novels like Defiance of the Fall, Accidental Champion, Corruption Wielder, Primal Hunter, Unbound, etc, you’ll enjoy this series.
