3.5 I loved Foundryside. It felt fresh and the characters and dialogues were fun. Shorefall wasn't quite as good. As so many fantasy epics, it suffers from the stakes being escalated unreasonably. It doesn't help that the antagonist(s) aren't really all that good either. Though i did enjoy the body horror that came along with it. The two distinct goals of the antagonists were also well done in my opinion. It's just the theatrics and some of the monologues that were a bit off-putting. Generally the heavy focus on action scenes and the slight lack of character development/dialogues were the book's greatest weakness for me. The finale was the best part of the book for me. It was slightly disappointed because it doesn't really conclude anything (2nd book syndrome i guess), but it's also cool because it dangled a lot of high concept stuff right in front of our noses and the action was done well. I really wish we would have gotten into the hive minds, distributed consciousness, vs. overwriting free will earlier. I also can't help but be disappointed that it didn't escalate into our heroes accidentally or intentionally creating a borg collective in the city. Would've been amazing. And pretty interesting in terms of how the antagonists might not be so wrong to eliminate or control tech to prevent humanity fucking itself over. The twinning was also amazing conceptually and done really well.