Book Review: Death Song by Gabriel Miller

Welcome back friends! Recently I finished the fourth novel in Corvus Belli's Infinity series, Death Song. The book departs from the previous three offerings by focusing on the Japanese Secessionist Army (JSA), which doesn't come as a surprise since they were released as the newest full faction in 2025.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the lore, fairly recently in the universe timeline the pan-Asian power, Yu Jing, was accused of callously throwing away the lives of the Japanese serving in the Yujingyu (that's the actual adjective, I promise) military, leading to the Uprising and the creation of a separate Japanese state. Yu Jing reprises its role as the antagonist in the story, and we see a scrappy group of oppressed Japanese bikers assist an infiltration team of professionals on their secret mission to occupied Kuriamori.

They have a bit of an adventure that I won't spoil here, and it was an enjoyable way to spend a couple evenings. We aren't breaking any barriers here with the plot, or twists, but it's a decent yarn and I'd recommend buying it if you really love playing Infinity.

Unfortunately, that's the only way that I could recommend it. As much as I personally enjoyed the story, there are frequently dissonant moments in the story based on actual in-game mechanics and weapons being referenced. It's not just a rifle that troop is using, it's a MULTI Rifle; the protagonist doesn't just use a clever hacking program to kill the enemy hacker, she uses Trinity to melt his brain.

From a reader's perspective this is suboptimal because it's just jarring to be in a cool scene and then have the obvious insert of a game term. To be entirely fair, the weapons as they were (maybe a little too precisely) described in the book do pretty much exactly the same thing as they do on the tabletop. Which can be a weakness. One of the biker character uses her hacking device to cloak her bike as something else (Cybermask) in the book, but that particular kind of unit hasn't been able to do that since the start of the N5 in December of last year.

I'd have to rank this book as the second weakest of the current novel offerings. Both Airaghardt and Aftermath were better constructed novels, with the former being my favorite and almost good enough to overlook the jarring use of technical terms, but significantly better and more comprehensible than Team Zed, but I may just not care enough about Nomads.

Thanks for sticking around to the end! Hopefully this short review was informative and helpful without any spoilers. Have you read any of the Infinity novels? Which was your favorite?