I requested this one because it might be an upcoming title I would like to review on my Youtube Channel. However, after reading the first several chapters I have determined that this book does not suit my tastes. So I decided to DNF this one.

I am interested in this story but the audiobook narration wasn't grabbing me so I'm waiting on a physical book.

Even though the audio was great, it did not click for me. Besides the novel being set in the Cyberpunk world, the rest was just another heist gone wrong story which are not my favourite.
If you enjoyed the game you'll probably like it but apart from that there's not much I can gush about sadly.

This book felt like the game but then as a novel in all the right ways.

To start off I will say I absolutely love the Cyperpunk 2077 game and that was a huge motivation to request this book on Netgalley. I have however not finished that game and stopped playing when my life was a bit too busy. Now with the Phantom Liberty DLC coming up I'm holding back starting over but that might have to wait a while because I currently do not own a PS5 to play on. I did however get to try out the DLC at Gamescom while I was still reading this book and both of them made me even more hyped up for the other, for the DLC to come out and to see where No Coincidence would bring the story to. But for all the gamers reading my review, if you loved the story and everything else in the game you will enjoy this book just the same.

For the gamers as well it's good to know that the narrator is the voice for female V. I actually did not play as female V so the voice wasn't as familiar as it would for some of you, but it was a very fun thing they did. As a negative comment I have to say I sometimes struggled a bit with her articulation but I felt that it got progressively better towards the end of the book and I had no issues with that anymore when I finished.

Then about the book, this book confused me at first. There is no single main character or single POV. The whole gang is the main character as a collective and you get POV parts from all of them. This adds a lot to the book however as you can follow how each of them have in true Night City style, their own motives and agenda's that don't line up the slightest. To see all of these points in the story progress together is a lot of fun and having this extra knowledge adds a lot of interesting moments to the book.

Then the cast is quite diverse in what kind of people are within the gang. What they all have in common though is that none of them have done a heist before when the book jumps right into their first at the start of the book. They're all rookies and basically have no idea what they're doing. I liked this a lot because it brings huge power plays into the books where things are unbalanced and add a lot of drama. They slowly find their way but things get progressively more complicated as one leads to another thing in Night City. It was fun seeing them trying to make sense of it all and get themselves in order again, especially when that is usually quite impossible.

What is fun as well is that Dum Dum from the main game is part of this book and there are even some POV points for him and the Maelstorm. It made the book connect a lot more to the game and the tie in was a nice added thing.

The gunfights in the book were a lot of fun too and I really enjoyed them. They were high action and heated moments. It felt like there was always something to loose and it was a lot of fun to see them squeeze out impossible binds to make it out alive. There was also a nice balance with how many of them were in the book alternating slower paced moments with action scenes. The dynamic in the fights kept changing too because the further along the book I got the more the crew knew how to handle weapons and fight so every fight felt quite different from the one before.

In conclusion this was a very fun book and I'm happy to see this universe is branching out to literature media too.


4.25 stars rounded down.

This book is for the people who played the game and watched the Netflix show, as the references is just thrown out there. It's not a bad thing, but I can't imagine reading this book without having played the game first.

All in all the book is very much Cyberpunk 2077, the gangs and lives of Night City is right there, and as mentioned above there are a lot of cool references if you played the game.
The book also shares some similarities with the Cyberpunk: Edgerunner series on Netflix, which make sense since the author helped with the script.

But for me the big character gallery and constant, violent switching of POV made the book very confusing, and I didn't have time to connect to the characters. It's a shame, because the characters are so important in a story set in a cyberpunk setting.
I'll admit I got more interested in the story in the end, but the start is very slow.

Even though this book wasn't for me I would still reccommend it to Cyberpunk fans, as a cool, little side mission heist story.

Basically if you’ve played the game, watched the tv show and want more of it, this is perfect for you. It’s like experiencing a new character perspective and story set in night city with all the shoot outs, corpos, robots like this is the perfect gift for someone who is a fan of cyberpunk 2077.

Now unlike Ruination which is a league of legends novel that you can read and fully understand everything without having played league of legends, I’m unsure if this would be as enjoyable for someone who hasn’t played or watched cyberpunk 2077. There are definitely some names, terms and locations mentioned that might be confusing. In fact I noticed a trend in reviews from people who are familiar with the world are rating it higher than people who have zero knowledge, makes sense but by all means, I say still give it a try, maybe my short explanation will help you and you’ll be set to go. It begins with a group of characters who are all mostly strangers to one another and they are put on a mission for a client to take down a convoy truck that belongs to militech (the main big bad company of this universe) because inside this truck is a very important large gray container. now all of these characters are your typical cyberpunk roster, some have chrome arms, lasers that come out of there fingers, all the surgical cybernetic enchantments you can think of and it’s constantly switches perspectives between them all.

I would also recommend this to people who like heist novels because it’s basically one big heist for 400 pages. Is it the best thing I’ve ever read? No. Was the cast of characters a little too big to really get to know them and connect with them individually, yea but I enjoyed my time here. I enjoyed the craziness, the cliché characters you can expect in a world like this, this book did exactly what it was meant to do, the author created a pure guilty pleasure fun read with all the fancy gun descriptions you can think of.