I usually enjoy everything Ringo writes, but I found that series pretty tedious to get through. It had some really really good chapters, but there was no sense of urgency, even though he tried to convey it. There were hardly any setbacks to overcome, it was just ‘we did this, it was hard but we finished. then we do this, it was hard but we did it, now we have more people, we can do the same thing only more of it.’ It’s characters came across as underdeveloped to me.
Hot Gate was in the same vein of infrastructure buildup to action, but it had better character development and that really sold it for me. It’s a shame he painted himself into a corner with that one and now feels that he can’t advance in an interesting fashion.