Eve 2.0 The Ultimate Gaming Experience ARC Review

Eve 2.0 The Ultimate Gaming Experience by Winter Lawrence is a LitRPG novel about a girl named Gwen and her friends getting stuck in a new VR game. Gwen’s online boyfriend Pete sent her the game, saying that it was his father’s new project. Gwen was planning to meet up with her boyfriend for the first time inside the game, but Gwen’s ex’s little brother Ben takes the package so he can try out the game for himself. Pete was supposed to be meeting up with Gwen in the game and he also goes into a coma. Now, it is up to Gwen and her ex Ryan to try to go into the game to get Pete and Ben out of the game and the coma.

I loved how this book had little bits of “gamer knowledge” thrown in throughout. Pete and Gwen play video games together quite often and so they know what they should do when they are in a sticky situation inside of the Eve games. Ben is young so he is always overly optimistic about everything, but he still knows quite a bit about games. Ryan doesn’t play games at all, so he knows absolutely nothing about what they should or should not be doing while inside the different games. Gwen has to explain everything to him, from items that will most likely lead to unnecessary side quests to how to fight monsters. Even though this game is an entirely different experience than anything else that they have played, Gwen and Pete still generally know what to do to lead their small team to victory.

At home, Pete’s father finds out that his son took this new game from him and that it has been placing its users into comas. Even though Pete’s father just wants to focus on making sure that his son is safe, his son didn’t really know what kind of game that he stole. The government has to be involved, and Gwen and her friends might be in for a rude awakening if they ever escape from Eve. This was another cool arc in my opinion, as you got to see the characters have some real repercussions for what they do. It isn’t resolved by the end of the book, but I hope it will be in the next installment of the series!

The only thing I didn’t like was the love triangle. If you have read my previous reviews of books with love triangles, you will know that they are one of my biggest pet peeves. It was annoying to see the banter between Pete and Ryan constantly in this book, but I hope that it will die down in the sequel. Hopefully Gwen will finally make up her mind!

Overall, this was a great YA LitRPG! I would recommend it to anyone looking for a new unique YA adventure to enjoy. I will definitely be letting you guys know when this one is published!

I received a copy of this book and this is my voluntary review.

Overall Rating: 4 out of 5 books