The Primal Hunter Book One by Zogarth - Book Review

Welp. I finally read the wildly popular LitRPG. Let’s talk about it. 

We are in the middle of a crazy successful Kickstarter for a limited edition run of the books 1-3. (Currently at nearly 1.2 million dollars of their 30,000 dollar goal.)

This genre is absolutely exploding.

And it entered Prime Reading. Which I only now found out is different from Kindle Unlimited. If you have Prime, you get access to a bunch of books for free. This is one of them!

It seems like the perfect time to jump in.

This review is spoiler free for book one.

The Primal Hunter Book One debuted in 2022 and is the first of eleven in the series. (11 books in 4 years. This author writes!)

Book One has all the hallmarks of the genre. Our main character, Jake, and a selection of his colleagues are dropped into a wooded area from their normal elevator at work. They quickly find out they are in the tutorial level of a real-life video game with life and death stakes. 

I enjoyed the book. Let’s start there and talk about the positives.

It’s decently well-written. The pacing is good, with the one exception of a very long cave stay. We head-hop a bit so it keeps even the slowest part of the book feeling lively. 

The mechanics of the world are very well done. (And make the sequels seem very appealing.) It takes the RPG element of the genre to its highest peak, with class systems, bloodlines, abilities, stats and much more. It may be the most well done version of this I’ve seen in a book.

One sort of funny thing that I didn’t like or dislike was the restating of his entire character profile. Every time he leveled or received a boost, it would relist the entire thing. By the end of the book it was quite a list of stats, abilities, etc. The Wiki even breaks them down by chapter. (I have no idea how strange this must sound in the audiobooks.)

The real stand out to me was the action scenes. Zogarth writes them incredibly well. You can feel the tension and thought. The skills and abilities the characters pick up through the game mechanics add up to some very unique fights. Throw in creatures wandering the world and you get some cool fights.

Let’s talk about a few negatives. I only have a few, I swear!

It has a lot of the flaws that the genre seems to carry. It was far too long. A good editor could cut 100 pages. And it got bogged down in details that are neat, but overexplained. 

The book  could have been cut down a decent amount without losing much. (LitRPGs love a big page count… which could explain my second issue…)

This book ends with, well, it’s not even a cliffhanger. It’s more the middle of a story. The ending came fast, abruptly and a bit unexpected. There was a big fight near the end but the book lingered a bit longer only to end with.. Well.. nothing really. 

It was strange. It made it feel less like a book ended and more like the pages just weren’t there yet. 

Most of this genre is on Kindle Unlimited from what I understand, so perhaps readers are more accustomed to simply rolling straight into the next book, but it still felt a bit disappointing. 

Even books with sequels, you still want an ending.

The characters are solid enough. A few felt like stand-ins waiting to die or basic stereotypes. Some of the interplay between characters feels forced and underdeveloped. But it doesn’t take too much away from the story. 

While the head-hopping between characters does give the pacing a boost, it does feel a touch uneven in points. It feels more like a way for the author to explain different character’s rationales then move the story along. There’s a few characters that may have been more interesting if we didn’t know their inner thoughts. 

My reviews always come out sounding more negative than I anticipated. I really enjoyed this book. I’ll be picking up the next one at some point for sure. 

For me, book reviews give me an opportunity to look back on what I would want someone to tell me if it was my book. That’s how I see them as an aspiring author. (Not that most authors would come across the review…)

Overall, this is one of the stronger entries I’ve read in the LitRPG space. It gives the full video game fantasy with great action and interesting mechanics. It sets up some very interesting storylines to follow and gives us enough in the character space to work with. 

With the tidbits we got, I imagine this might be the least interesting entry in the series. (As tutorials in video games always are.)

Let me know if you’ve read The Primal Hunter, what did you think?

Cheers.