The Good Guys

Start this one when you want a long, funny, low-stress hangout with a protagonist you like, not a power curve you can chart. The Good Guys is 16 books deep and still running, and after a couple of hundred hours with it I can tell you exactly what it is: a comedic portal-fantasy adventure carried by its lead and its narrator, not by its numbers. It is for readers who want company more than crunch, and who do not mind a hero who is slow to learn. Skip it if you live for tight stat tracking or a protagonist who seizes every advantage the moment he gets it, because Montana does neither.

I am reviewing the series as it stands, all 16 books, because the shape of this thing only makes sense across the whole run. Book 1, One More Last Time, is barely 8 hours and reads like a prologue. Judge the series on it alone and you will undersell what comes later. It needs room.

The setup is clean. A burned-out ex-soldier takes a last-second offer to step into iNcarn8, a game world that promises a second life, and comes out the other side as Montana Coggeshall, a tank with superhuman strength, a stubborn conscience, and no idea what he is doing. He lands the deeply unglamorous role of heir to a crumbling dukedom in a corner of Vuldranni nobody wants, and the series becomes the slow work of turning that wreck into a place worth defending. Dungeon crawls, goblin trouble, and a town that grows out of nothing follow.

Here is the real draw, and it is Montana. He is a stubborn, emotionally messy guy trying to do right inside a system that keeps punishing him for it, and Ugland writes him with enough warmth that you stay invested even when he frustrates you. And he will frustrate you. Montana does not learn from his mistakes as fast as you want, and he sits on real advantages, including favors that could solve the problem in front of him, while you yell at him to use them. I came around on this. A protagonist who is overpowered in a brawl and weak at the actual decisions is a more interesting person to follow than one who optimizes every turn. Your patience may run shorter than mine did, and that is a fair line to draw.

What you are actually signing up for

Crunch is low, and this is the honest warning for genre purists. The iNcarn8 system is real: skills level through use, godly patrons hand out boons like Regeneration and Powerful Build that set Montana apart, and quests come with formal success and failure. But the stat tracking fades in and out across the run. Some books hand you the screens and the numbers; others skip them almost entirely. If a clean, legible power curve is what you came for, the inconsistency will needle you, and a lot of LitRPG readers say exactly that. The mechanics serve the people and the jokes here, not the other way around.

One quirk worth knowing going in: Montana is locked out of magic entirely. His "Fallen" race bars spellcasting, so this is a barbarian build the whole way down, no fireballs, no clever spell combos, just a very large man hitting things very hard and getting creative about it. I liked the constraint. It keeps the fights physical and keeps him from solving problems by leveling into a new toy.

Pace runs medium and uneven. The adventure stretches move; the town-building stretches slow down, sometimes to a crawl, and a couple of mid-series books, around the 7 to 8 range, draw fair criticism for reading like side-quest collections that do not advance much. The early books run short, under 10 hours each, which makes some of them feel like chapters of a bigger story rather than self-contained arcs. Books 15 and 16 finally stretch out to 13 and 15 hours and the extra room suits the series. If you bounce off a filler stretch in the middle, know that the back half pulls itself back together.

The humor is the glue. The book titles tell you the register before you start, Heir Today Pawn Tomorrow, Eastbound and Town, Four Beheadings and a Funeral, and the prose keeps that up without forcing it. It stays funny without going broad or juvenile, which is harder than it sounds across this many books.

One thing the community keeps flagging, and I will second it: there is no harem. In a genre that defaults to it, Ugland just declines, and the series is better and easier to recommend for it. If you have been burned by series that turn into roster management, that absence is a feature.

The audio is the way in

Neil Hellegers narrates all 16 books, and the audio is the format I would steer you to first. He has a real handle on Montana's deadpan, lands the comic timing the prose is reaching for, and keeps a large, growing cast separated enough that you always know who is talking. For a series this long and this funny, a narrator who gets the jokes is half the value, and Hellegers gets them. The full run is roughly 152 hours, and it is the kind you settle into rather than push through.

Where to read or listen: the ebooks are on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited, and Tantor publishes the Hellegers audio on Audible. When you finish, the natural next stop is The Bad Guys, Ugland's companion series set in the same world but following Clyde, a thief and con man, so you get Vuldranni from the rogue's side instead of the tank's.

The scoring, with reasons. Narration earns a 9 on Hellegers carrying the comedy across all 16 books. Characters land at 8, almost entirely on Montana and the cast around him. Story sits at 7, a fun, episodic adventure with real momentum problems in the middle. Prose is a 7, loose and genuinely funny but not doing literary work. Progression scores a 5, and that is a fit number, not an insult: the system is present but deprioritized and inconsistently tracked, which delights character-first readers and disappoints crunch-first ones. If you want a long, low-stakes comedy with a hero worth liking and a narrator worth following, this is an easy yes. If you want your numbers to matter, it is an easy no.