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3.5/10: Revival

Revival by ThatWildWolf

{based on a video game}

In 2077, a nuclear holocaust wiped out most of humanity.

In the fallout of the war, one survivor sets out on a quest to avenge her family. Unprepared for what she'll have to face, she is thrown into a cruel post-apocalyptic world, where every second is a fight for survival. With time, each choice becomes harder... And even though she may not want it, her actions will decide about the future of this wasteland.

COVER: I actually really dig the cover, although I'm not sure how much it fits the story. It gives the impression of some kind of western/country-style story. So, I like the cover, but I don't think the impression that it gives fits what the blurb is telling me about the story.

GRAMMAR: Around the middle of the first chapter, I noticed this: "Sir, the television" was the only answer we received. Personally, I think a dash at the end of television would help show that cut-off type of speech where it's just a sentence started and never ended. It's just what I would do, not necessarily a mistake.

This isn't grammar, but there's also a little mistake not long after the previous one. "We need to get to the Vault!" Nate exclaimed, which made snap out of it. You're just missing that me right after made.

Punctuation-wise, you have a few places where there is a comma at the end of some dialogue, but what follows isn't a tag, it's more of an explanation of what a certain character is doing. If it doesn't describe the actual dialogue or it's not a little insert of action between a sentence, don't add the comma at the end of the previous dialogue. Stop the dialogue, say what you have to say, and then start again.

CONTENT: So the first chapter starts pretty warmly. Nate, an army officer, and Nora Smith are having a pleasant old morning with their baby, Shaun, and what I assume to be their robot butler, Codsworth? I think I missed what he is, exactly, because it seems he isn't human. And suddenly, the television reports bombs dropped in Eastern USA and the MC realizes that they're in the middle of an atomic war. That's a lot to fit into half a chapter (not even that), but it works, I think. It's not bad at all so far. So, when everyone is rushed under into that bunker sort of thing, Nora seems to be more or less prepared for it. She seems to have forgotten all about the life above and, although obviously she can't seem to wrap her mind around the situation, she adapts quickly. I get the sense that maybe she's adapting a bit too quickly, maybe? I don't know, it just feels like she would maybe need a little more to acknowledge that the world had just ended. It's also funny how when someone asks for her size, she says M instead of medium. It feels a little awkward for her to say M instead of medium. I get that everything was changed, turned, and flipped upside down but M still means medium, I'm pretty sure.

As things get started and they through the routine of arrival, Nora is kind of admiring the things that she is given and her surroundings. I'm not sure if that's on purpose, but it feels a bit off because she just lost her whole world -- literally -- so it's not like what she's given is an upgrade to her previous situation. This is especially since earlier she had basically scoffed at the idea of a "vault." Giving "credit where credit is due" doesn't feel fitting at the moment. Too quickly, it seems, she's already ready for a whole new life. There is so much development of character shoved into what I assume to be a few hours. It's just a little rushed, you know?

And here we go again. So she's cryogenically frozen, then she wakes up to see her baby taken away and her husband shot (this scene is also weird because she notices the man and what he looks like, but not the blood that obviously has to come from somewhere critical, the head or the heart maybe, since he was killed with one shot and goes limp immediately), then she's frozen again, and then she wakes up again to fight the machine trying to get out and then drop by her husband to cry. The baby throughout this whole situation doesn't cry, I guess, or make any sound, so he's either dead and they didn't notice or he's a doll because he had to have been woken up with the both of his parents. Anyway, when she wakes up to find her husband dead on the floor, she sits with him until the "sadness passed" and now she's just big mad and vows for revenge. Then she starts complaining about another -- this word is key here -- thing Vault-Tec had taken away. Earlier she was admiring the stuff that Vault-Tec was putting her in, and now she's implying that Vault-Tec had taken away even the most basic of luxuries such as burying her husband. So before thinking about taking care of her man and putting his dead body anywhere, she gets up, makes a promise to come back to his then-rotting corpse, probably, and leaves to look for help. She looks for everyone that came with her only to find them all dead, and the next thing she does is wonder aloud, "what happened here?" She doesn't run out of the room with dead bodies like a normal person, she just stands there and stares until she realizes her baby isn't dead and she needs to find him.