A thrilling sci-fi, action adventure with a gamer twist. Young gamers are falling into comas and the world is on the brink of being taken over by an evil AI, but can the teenagers stop Razer before it’s too late? Final Video Game is a science-fiction story packed full of action. As the AI of a popular video game starts to threaten the world outside the screens, teenagers everywhere are recruited into battle in the last chance to stop its takeover. Thirteen year old Oliver is an unwitting hero, just started at a new school and still finding his feet, only having played Razer while at his friends house, he is recruited and sets off to fight on the virtual battlefield. The plot is full of twists and turns as the fight to outwit the AI before it’s too late.
I think that this book has a really clever premise, it has Age of Ultron vibes and there’s plenty of close scrapes and high tension as Oliver and the other teens fight to stop Razer. On the surface this is a thrilling and gripping sci-fi, action story that middle grade and teen readers would enjoy. As we see the havoc wrought by Razer in the real world it raises issues of our dependence on computers and technology, as well as more bluntly exploring the threat of Artificial Intelligence and cyber warfare. The recruitment of young children and teens to essentially fight a war was a concept I found really powerfully sinister. It added to the tension and the feeling of pressure on Oliver and the other recruits to succeed, undercutting some of the characters as they treated it like just another video game. Sci-fi and video game fans will also enjoy the references dotted throughout this entertaining, interesting and multi-faceted story.
Thirteen-year-old Oliver has moved to a new town and school with his mom after his dad disappeared two years earlier. Leaving his best friend David behind, he's begun a tentative friendship with his classmate Logan, who spend time together playing the world's most popular video game series, Razer. But when fellow gamers start falling into comas-more than sixty million worldwide-they learn that the artificial intelligence of the game has become massively powerful and impossible to control. The AI has gone rogue and is harnessing the neural brain power of gamers through their headsets, launching an attack to take over the world's infrastructure and holding everyone hostage in its wake.
Their only hope to save humanity is to eradicate the AI by beating it at its own game. And who better to accomplish that than the teen gamers obsessed with Razer. A secret agency of the government has been aware of the AI war, such as it is, and has launched an offensive by using the very segment of the population that the AI is targeting, teens, and recruiting them to fight on a virtual video game battlefield with an enemy consisting of cyborgs led by a ruthless and ganglike AI leader of the same name, Razer. Now Oliver and Logan are part of those teens recruited into gaming assault troops, launching a coordinated global strike to force their way into the AI's mainframe and take it down...before it's too late.
A thought-provoking and intellectual story about our existence among and reliance on computers, technology, and the rising use of artificial intelligence.
