To sum it up, it’s cool but ridiculous.
Reading Heroes' Prison is like listening to a kid trying to describe an awesome idea of his, going over-the-top and not understanding that things don’t actually work that way.
Example: Out of nowhere, the MC “discerned a footstep in the muds that was near to him. It looked like it belonged to a youngster of about 20 years old, and his height was about 1.75m. And based on the depth of the footstep, this man was quite thin but his walking speed was calm and stable in every footstep.” Within the virtual world, to boot. Even an experienced tracker can’t just know that kind of information from looking at a footstep. And this random footstep was perfectly preserved for an unknown period of time, just so it could tell the MC that someone else had been there. This author’s been reading too many novels. For shame!
What’s good:
It has a really interesting concept. The author assumes his readers have read virtual reality novels before, and skips ahead of the usual buildup to show the things that we look forward to (though this isn’t entirely good). Great achievements seem to give only a small but permanent reward, so they don’t let certain characters (like the MC) shoot ahead of everyone or make the accomplishment obsolete later.
But there’s too much attempted oomph yet too little actual oomph in everything:
-Unimpressive characters, including the OMGsoCHILLandSMARTandSTRONG perfect MC, and the most powerful and secretive elder in the world (who even countries fear and is pretty much the owner of the VRMMORPG and yadda yadda ) that quickly becomes the MC’s backer.
-Xianxia-like counting in both the virtual and real world: landmasses billions of miles across, ten billion people dying to a nuclear device, over a million different rare playable races. Some numbers are obviously incorrect, but I don’t know if they’re mistakes by the author or the translator.
-Description: A solid D, maybe a C for effort. Badly done foreshadowing when it’s done at all. Poor pacing, and tends to ignore buildup to jump to the result. Often doesn’t describe things that need description, but can spend too long describing pointless stuff.
-Plot: Not very unified or sensible. Two or three chapters of the dozen have been spent on the MC solving a “mystery” and explaining his deductions. It’s not very well done, and this isn’t a mystery novel in the first place. If the author wants to write a detective story, he’s free to do that, but he’s just piling a bunch of “cool” moments on top of one MC instead. And let’s not forget the global conspiracy which doesn’t make any kind of sense that the MC’s neck deep in.
2.5 stars. It’s not a good novel with some weaknesses, but a bad novel with some strengths. But if you don’t notice its problems or are able to ignore them, you’ll enjoy the story.