Player vs. Player 2 – Attack of the Bots

M.K. England's Attack of the Bots is a gaming adventure for 11 year olds about three young pro gamers with a missing teammate.

What happens

Hannah, Larkin and Josh play the online battle game Affinity as a team called The Weird Ones. They stream their matches to thousands of viewers, and their first professional match is only days away.

There's one big problem. Their fourth player, Wheatley, vanished at the end of the tournament in the first Player vs. Player book. Nobody has heard from him since, and Wheatley was never exactly an ordinary player.

The chat won't stop asking where he is. Meanwhile the team keeps getting matched with strangers who play a lot like him. Coincidence? Larkin jokes that it's a conspiracy.

The chapters take turns between the three of them, so you get to be inside each head. Hannah is serious and brilliant and hates being on camera. Larkin is bubbly and loves chatting to viewers. Josh is quiet, a bit lonely and keeping a secret character all to himself.

Real life gets in the way too. Hannah's mum works two jobs and can't get time off to take her to the big eSports convention in Los Angeles. Josh's dad thinks gaming could never be a proper job. Plenty of families will recognise those conversations!

Reading it feels a bit like watching a stream. The fights are fast and full of gamer talk (heals, tanks, stuns), and the chat messages scroll right there on the page. The best bit is the chat filter that swaps insults for nonsense, so a troll ends up calling Hannah a CHAMPION FIGURE SKATER.

If your reader spends their evenings with a headset on, they'll probably see themselves in this. It also shows the less fun side of being online, like nasty comments and a player who won't leave them alone, in a way that's easy to talk about together.

What to read next

For another gamer who'd rather be holding a controller than doing anything else, try Gordon Korman's Slacker. Cameron is so deep in a game that he doesn't notice his house filling up with smoke.