Item - American Knights

I just finished going over this book and it was overall a major disappointment. There's almost no information on this book online, so I went in fairly blind.

The good - I had read some other non-gamebooks by the author, Nick Pollotta, and liked his humorous style, and it fit the slightly wacky Gamma World universe that the story was placed in. It has good world building, mutant creatures to fight, and Cryptic alliance to meet. I've been following the Gamma World setting since the first edition. A few typos but not too bad.

This is from the second wave of TSR's Endless Quest books and is fairly thick, with 188 pages or so of story in small type. Pictures are of low amount and many are only half page.

As in a lot of Endless Quest books, some sections are fairly large, and some just lead into another section instead of a choice.

Your character in the book is an 18 year old boy named Jason from modern times on a tour of a military base. The nuclear holocaust starts just then, and Jason stumbles into a BioFreezer unit and wakes up to Gamma World four hundred years later.

The story can be divided up into 3 parts - part one in the military base, part two exploring the wilderness, and part three, teaming up with an Alliance to fight the major bad guys of the book.

The bad - Just about everything but the story. The author has a clear path that he wants you to follow, and you WILL follow it. I think he had little idea how a multi-branching gamebook is supposed to work.

Most of the choices you're given either lead to a "the end" or aren't a choice at all. E.G. - you can take the elevator or the stairs. If you take the elevator, it breaks and you take the stairs anyway.

You only have one spot in the book where you have two major branches. But when the second part ends, these branches merge back into a final single path at the third part of the book again.

Good for a single read only. He did a sequel to this book with the same characters called The 24-Hour War but from the little I've heard about that, it's not very good either.

More reviews by Randomdays