[Book] Underdog: Hackers of Artem - the closest I'll get to reading LitRPG

I dislike LitRPG as a genre. I won't stop anyone from reading it, but I personally think it's a lazy cop-out to world-building. I tried reading one that started talking about the character's mana points and putting items in their inventory (when the character wasn't inside a video game) and I immediately put it down. Also, I'm pretty bitter about the fact that the entire 'cyberpunk' section of the Kindle store is nothing but LitRPG. I don't consider LitRPG to be cyberpunk-by-default and it bothers me that I can't actually find cyberpunk novels because of all the LitRPG to wade through.

But, I'm a sucker for cyberpunk stories with hackers and, as I mentioned, I struggle to find new cyberpunk novels in the Kindle store as it is. So I took a chance with Underdog: Hackers of Artem.

As far as LitRPG goes, it doesn't stray too far into that genre. Any time a character gets a new augmentation, the book shows me their updated character sheet as if they were in a TTRPG. I don't care how many points are now allocated to the character's dexterity rating so I would just skip over those character sheets. And honestly, that was really the only indicator this was a LitRPG. Nothing else in the plot/story/world-building felt like LitRPG so it didn't really bother me.

As for the story, it's about a group of high-tech low-life friends who decide to work together to start a gang. They get in over their head, get attention from bigger gangs, and we're off and running.

Overall, I liked it. Each member of the gang has a role (the leader, the muscle, the hacker) and the main POV follows the hacker, which is what I wanted. My only real complaint is that the book is 740 pages long and once I reached about 70% into the book it really started to feel like I was approaching the end. They resolved the main conflict, there was a bit of a time jump, and a nice epilogue showing where each character ended up. I was starting to think the remaining 30% of the book would be like an appendix, or glossary, or, I don't know, rules to play in this world as a TTRPG or something. But no, after that resolution and epilogue there was an entirely new conflict with new antagonists and new struggles for the characters to face. It felt like the last 30% should've been book 2 in the series, or an exclusive ebook or something. It was strange. That second story wasn't bad, it was just odd to include it in the first book. Especially when the book is over 700 pages; the author didn't exactly need to pad the length.

One thing that's kind of neat about this book is a group of authors got together and decided to each write their own story within Artem, the city where this takes place. So one author might write a story about an ogre living as a weapons dealer in Artem and another author can have their characters buy weapons from that ogre. It's a nice little connected world for readers of the series without feeling like required reading (kinda like the Cosmere). Although, as far as I can tell, there's no website or grouping in the Kindle store to help you find the other connected books. I think there's just the Hackers of Artem, Pilots of Artem, and Artem Underworld series but you'd think if these authors wanted you to find more about their inter-connected world they'd... post that somewhere online or something. It's just weird that if I was a huge fan and desperately wanted to learn more, I'm not sure where I'd go.

But anyway, aside from all the other Artem books I could read, I enjoyed Hackers of Artem.