Book Review: Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl 4) by Matt Dinniman

4/5 stars. (Audiobook gets 5/5! Jeff Hays does an outstanding job with his narration.) 

In this fourth installment of this unique LitRPG series, Carl and Donut are stuck inside of a giant bubble that contains air, land, sea, and underground quadrants that all must be cleared of their bosses before the stairwells to the next level will open. As usual, there is a good number of explosions, battle/action scenes, plotting and planning behind the scenes, NPCs that need to be helped, and several quests to complete. I enjoyed this story as much as I have the last few, although we did not get to see as much of Odette as in previous books, and the the challenges seem to just keep getting more difficult with the showrunners and A.I. making each level harder to successfully complete. I liked seeing more of the politics of the universe and the factions in this story and getting some hints about what is to come. Of course, since there are already three more books, we know Carl is going to survive, but each storyline is about what ways he and his compatriots can succeed while still screwing with Borant and the other factions as much as possible. I look forward to continuing this series and hope that we see much more of the background interactions between the crawlers and the factions as the story progresses. I get a sense that the next book, being level six, will offer many more of these interactions and some more direct confrontations between Carl (et al), Borant, the Skull Empire, etc. Highly recommended, but especially the audiobooks by Jeff Hays – SOOOOO GOOOOOOD!!