I'm really quite amazed that this indie game has its own novel. I've certainly heard of big-budget games having books, or books being written after the fact for games which turned out to be incredibly successful; but how many small developers have ever commissioned a novel (and full audiobook narration!) as part of the initial development process?!

I've now finished listening to the audiobook, and I agree that it's an engaging story. I've played very little of the game so far, so I'm guessing a bit here, but my gut feeling is that listening to the book before playing the game is perhaps the best way to do it, because it provides so much background to what's going on in the game!

The narration is pretty good for the most part. My only persistent complaint was that he hardly paused at many (if not most) of the mid-chapter scene changes, which leaves the listener scrambling to catch up. I don't know if that was an issue in the recording or the editing, but I found it annoying and it could surely have been fixed in the edit.

I also struggled a bit with the audio format on account of the sheer number of characters and names -- a single character might be referred to by their first name, last name, or mech callsign, and during the first several chapters I would simply lose track of who was being referred to. In one case I thought a particular callsign belonged to someone else; in another I thought that a person-and-callsign pair actually referred to two different people. I caught up eventually, but it was pretty confusing in the early going, because with an audiobook you can't just skim back through the pages to check.

Everything else comes down to the writing, and I guess YMMV on that front. It's certainly a style of writing I've never encountered, and I didn't always like it, but I came to appreciate it for the most part. My first impressions were NOT great, however (particularly some of the dialogue), so it's worth noting that it definitely grew on me, and I was glad that I gave it a chance to do so.

There is a great deal of combat in the story, and the writing is extraordinarily focused on the moment-to-moment details of battle, and fairly revels in finding new gruesome ways to describe death and destruction. This can be quite off-putting.

I felt the result was very much like watching a combat-heavy big-budget sci-fi film, with all of the military technology, special effects, big explosions, noise, and general carnage.

The first film analogy that sprang to mind, however, was Black Hawk Down. I thought Brigador was a lot better than Black Hawk Down, but I didn't like Black Hawk Down at all. (I'm not really sure whether that's helpful information!)

Perhaps the best thing I can say about the book is to reiterate that it actually won me over. You can no doubt tell that it's not the kind of thing I'd usually read, and it's also not the kind of thing I'd be inspired to read by the ways in which I've described it, so the fact that I listened to the whole thing in a fairly short span of time definitely says something in its favour.

My final comment is simply that I'm genuinely glad that I purchased the version of the game which included the book, as I believe I'll enjoy the game all the more for having listened to the story that came with it. Thanks again to those who recommended doing so.