An intriguing story that could have used more chapters.

The first half of Deathtopia is fantastic. It has a great atmosphere with some good mysteries sprinkled in as the main character is learning about the monsters known as "Cheaters" and trying to stop their murdering rampage. The book is very gory. Super detailed regarding the deaths. There's some nice fanservice, but it's mostly a horror manga that's not afraid to show boobs.

During the first half of the series, I noticed that it's very fast paced. Deathtopia is more plot-driven than character-driven, however, it does have good character work that other plot-driven manga skip over. However, it still falls into the bad habits of plot-driven stories and there aren't enough chapters or scenes where we can sit with the characters and explore who they are outside of their job. As it is, the plot of Deathtopia follows case after case of the cheaters and their victims. Once a cheater is captured or killed the team is immediately given a new cheater case. There's hardly any downtime.

The second half covers more of the backstories between each character and finally reveals who everyone is and the mysteries surrounding their whole predicament. I didn't think this was handled well. The villains could have been interesting multi-faceted characters, but in the end, they were reduced to the whole "MWAHAHA I'm EVIL!!" schtick with some eye-rolling twists. The series does pull off the type of "reveal" that really pisses me off in stories when either the author wants to continue a story past its endpoint or when an author is trying to make more of an impact with twists. It's really annoying, and most of the wrap up didn't feel satisfying.

In the end, the series did end okay, but I wished there was more finality to character arcs and what they did after everything that went down. It's really frustrating when it had such a solid foundation.

It was fun.

I would recommend.

The first 4 volumes are intense.