Not the best narration

A book about orks that is half about the mechanicus and read by the wrong narrator

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Ignore the critics

it was brilliant! One of the few books where you can easily tell which character is speaking by the excellent narration. Really good insight into Orks and other factions.

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Glorious orky fun!

A FULL ORK NOVEL - what a joyous surprise! This was just as entertaining as expected, and made me laugh with sheer delight a fair few times. The alternating perspectives of the Orks and their enemies work very effectively, especially the wholly unexpected and fascinating perspective of [SPOILER] which suddenly complicates the previously straightforward conflict between the Ork invaders and the hapless Adeptus Mechanicus.

More of this please Black Library - two big green thumbs up!

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Insanely good

Having been a fan of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40k universes for a long time the question of 'can we have alien POV novels has been around for what feels like forever. It was always a hard no on the basis of aliens are, well, alien. So much so that their thought processes should be so different from humans that POV from their side of things just wouldn't work. Thankfully, that hard no has turned into a solid yes in the form of 'Brutal Kunnin'. It was bound to happen. 

Brutal Kunnin is one of those books that can only go one of two ways. In traditional ork fashion, there simply is no middle ground. You are either going to really enjoy this, or curse Black Library for a pack of fools. I fall into the 'well, that was much needed and pretty damn awesome' camp.

The orks, as you can imagine, are a shooty, smashy, ill-tempered and hot-blooded race that (especially considering their chant at one point of 'come and have a go if you think you're hard enough') puts me in mind of English football thugs just out for a good scrap.

This book is set in two different POVs. On the first hand we have the orks; everything they do is brilliant and utterly hilarious. Everytime an ork POV ends and switches over to the Mechanicus, it has you hungering for more greenskin badassery. And then there is the aforementioned Mechanicus. For my money, the cogboys are a very difficult group of people to make interesting. They are more machine than human and have very few, if any, emotional attachments. This makes them VERY hard to warm to, VERY hard to get behind and INCREDIBLY hard to care about. In Brutal Kunnin', the Mechanicum were a little easier to get in the minds of. I feel Brooks did an excellent job of writing them but, for me at least, they are the reason this book is a four instead of a five.

As good as their parts were, I feel that, when writing for the Mechanicum, Brooks was simply a victim of his own success. He did such a great job of making the orks utterly wonderful, that I just didn't care about the other side of things as much as the author would have wanted me to. Which is a shame, as their part of the story was very intriguing. I just kept wanting it to hurry up so I could get back to the mindless brutality of the orks.

I feel this would have been a solid five out of five if the Mechanicum were switched with an Imperial Guard faction as getting to see a WAAARGH!!!! through the eyes of men and women who are human enough to appreciate the sheer terror of what is coming for them would have been excellent. I can only hope that, with future novels, the orks will have a more human enemy to balance them out (even if it's the space marines it would have been an improvement).

In short: read this book or, better yet, listen to the audio book. The narrator was outstanding and bought such energy to his performance that you felt as if you were being swept up and dragged along with the green horde. 

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Waaaaaaargh!

Dat was zoggin' brutal! Loved it! Plenty of smashin' da humies and nickin' da loot.

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Orks!

I really enjoyed Brutal Kunnin', there were some hilarious interactions between the various Orks, and a fresh perspective in being mostly from an Ork point of view. It was also nice to get the perspective of the adeptus mechanicus and the realisation of a Waaaagh falling upon their forge world.
Great naration also.

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Pretty good

I wasn't a fan of the voice acting but overall it was a great story.

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Very good, very funny, much dakka!

I love the Orks their so funny. love the tech priests too. definitely worth the listen

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Fun story, interesting subplot

Good ork focused story with fun admech pov and subplot(s). titans/knights feel underpowered unnecessarily

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Engaging and hilarious

A fantastic read if you're looking for a slightly more light-hearted and less grimdark WH40k book.

The story is fast-paced and engaging, with a cast of varied and interesting characters, and a high dose of good ol' ork ingenuity. It manages to balance humorous and light-hearted moments against the seriousness and increasing desperation of a world being overrun by the ork invasion, spruced up with internal politicking and personal drama.

It's also particularly entertaining to see the jarring contrast between the mindset and perspective of an ork and of the Adeptus Mechanicus - each of the sides views themselves as perfectly reasonable and logical, and the other as bizarre and incomprehensible. And honestly each has pretty understandable logic that leads to that conclusion.

And in truth? Watching a battle from a perspective of an ork is just delightful. Ork boyz just stay winning in this galaxy.

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