Super Powereds Review: Brilliantly Crafted Disappointment

Why a superhero series is on this site

Super Powereds isn't LitRPG; it's a superhero academy series, and it's here because it keeps getting recommended in the same breath as the genre: the go-to "palate cleanser" pick, the supposed S tier of superhero fiction, sitting at 4.6 stars with thousands of reviews, with everyone insisting it's great. I'm here to tell you that consensus is an absolute freaking lie, and this is the F tier on this site, the grade I reserve for books that make me angry about the hours I gave them. My notes from right after finishing said I'd invested 75 to 80 hours. I checked the actual runtimes for this review: the four Years total roughly 150. Somehow, discovering I'd sunk double what I remembered made me angrier.

Nobody seems to agree with me on this one. Sit down anyway.

The strangest pan I'll ever write

Here's what makes this a weird review: Drew Hayes is an incredible writer. Sheer sentence-level talent, top of the class. The dialogue, the polish, the way an enormous cast, students, faculty, heroes, villains, gets humanized until every last one feels like a real person: all of it is legitimately S-tier craft, and I understand completely why people rave. But being a great writer and a great storyteller are different jobs, and this series is my proof. Every component of a great story is present. The story never arrives.

The setup is strong. In this world, everyone gets one power, the powers are wildly unequal, and beneath the heroes exists an underclass called Powereds, people born unable to control their abilities. The series follows a group who receive an experimental procedure to fix that, then enroll secretly in a hero academy. Our lead, Vince, has an ability that is, on paper, one of the most broken in the setting: absorption and control of energy. All energy. The man is a potential living sun. Magneto conquers continents with magnetism alone; sit and imagine what a hero could do with everything.

Keep imagining, because that's the only place it happens.

All tease, no payoff

Vince spends four years of academy, 150 hours of audio, terrified of his own power. Afraid of hurting people, afraid of being seen as too dangerous, afraid, apparently, of being interesting. Every encounter, he uses the absolute minimum force to scrape through, manufacturing fake tension in fights his power set should trivially end, including fights where the other side is genuinely trying to kill him. The man has no self-preservation instinct, and the story treats that as depth rather than malfunction. And here's the hand-wave that finishes it: this world has superhero psychologists, telepaths, and mind-healers on faculty. Vince's crippling fear, the single obstacle between him and everything, is never meaningfully treated. It can't be, because it's the only thing holding the premise together.

There is exactly one cool moment in 150 hours, at the climax of Year 2, and Vince has to be functionally mind-controlled into it, tricked into believing he's fighting nightmares instead of people, so his fear switches off and you finally glimpse what he could be. I remember thinking: there it is, that's the setup, now book three pays it off. No. That glimpse is all you get. He never lets loose again. The ending is the class graduating into entry-level hero work, where the guy everyone in-story describes as a future god of their world signs up for the same starter career as classmates with parlor-trick powers. Even his hero name is a childish little nothing, and no, I won't spoil it; invest 150 hours and be exactly as disappointed as I was. That's the note the series leaves you on. All those courses of "he's too dangerous to let live" served across three books, and the kitchen never sends out the meal.

The world-building springs the same leaks. Heroes categorically can't kill except under a tribunal's absurd after-the-fact standard, applied with total inconsistency: some famous heroes flout it openly, others get crucified, and the story hand-waves the difference every time it's convenient.

The fans vs. me

This is the widest gap between community consensus and my verdict on the entire site, and I've thought about why. I think readers who prize craft, and Hayes delivers craft, genuinely, are getting full value: the friendships, the slice-of-campus-life, the humanized cast. If that's the meal you came for, the stars make sense. I came for a superhero story: struggle, growth, and the payoff where the hero finally becomes what the story spent a hundred hours promising. On that axis the series goes past disappointing into deliberate tease with no delivery, and knowing the author had the talent to deliver makes it worse, not better. It's also why this sits on my most overrated list. If you disagree, you have thousands of allies on Amazon. And that's okay; not every book is for everyone. This one, emphatically, was not for me.

For the record, I skipped Corpies, the spinoff following graduates into corporate hero work. After four Years of teasing, I wasn't giving the franchise another 25 hours to not pay off.

Verdict

Not worth the credit. F tier. Not because it's incompetent, it's the most competently written book on my F shelf, and Kyle McCarley's narration is perfectly solid, but because F is where I put series I actively regret, and no series has made me regret more hours. I will never listen to another Drew Hayes book, which is its own kind of review of a writer this talented. If you want the academy structure with actual payoff, the genre is full of it. There are a lot of books out there. I want to be entertained, not strung along for 150 hours, and neither do you.