posted on 23 Nov 2019

Cyborg by Chris Bradford

Cyborg is the high-octane conclusion to Chris Bradford’s hugely enjoyable Virtual Kombat trilogy – and it doesn’t disappoint. I reviewed its predecessor, Virus, on this site back in November of last year and I said then how much I was looking forward to this final instalment and if you have a young reader in the house (the book is guided for 8+) they will be enthralled by where the story takes them.

Although all three books in the trilogy share a developing and chronologically continuous storyline, the books are cunningly constructed in a way that allows a reader to come in at any point and get a  short but completely effective update on the plot right from the outset.

In this final instalment we re-join Scott and his gang of techno-hackers after they have succeeded in bringing down the evil Vince Power and his ubiquitous on-line virtual reality game, Virtual Kombat. As we discovered in the previous books, Power’s virtual world was so seductive that people had become literally enslaved to it and young people were being hooked up to play the game and suffering long term damage to their brains as a result. Scott and his crew destroy the game from inside and in the process believe that they have also killed off Vince Power.

This episode opens with everyone trying to get used to living in the real world now that Virtual Kombat has gone. It’s taking quite a lot to adjust to and things aren’t exactly being helped by the nagging suspicion that Power is somehow still out there. But is he?

What I can tell you is that even though the savage fighting of the virtual world is over, what’s been unleashed in the real world is even worse. Will the team be able to survive the rules of an online game in a world where the consequences are all too real?

Chris Bradford certainly puts the pedal to the metal in this one and the result is a breath-taking roller-coaster ride of action and thrills that will have any reader turning the page in anticipation. The book comes from the Barrington Stoke ‘super-readable’ series for reluctant readers or those with dyslexia issues and I’m pretty sure that’s an audience that will also discover what ‘unputdownable’ means.

 

Terry Potter

November 2019