Sonic Omens
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 The result of reworking the early gameplay presentations of Sonic Frontiers into the biggest franchise-insulting scamfest since Hunt Down the Freeman.
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Sonic Omens is a Sonic fan game developed by Russian developer Ouroboros Studio and published by BOLT. The first 2 episodes were released on March 14, 2020, initially titled Sonic 2020 and the development was fully completed on August 10th, 2022.
Why It's a Slow Omen
- The game had a very shady development, with the most notable example being the fact that the developers were exposed to profiting from their game with several websites like Patreon. We should remind you that unless you open it because you want your fans to support you, profiting from a fan game is illegal and risks you getting a lawsuit from the original developers.
- What's even shadier is that in their account on Boosty (a Russian donation site similar to Patreon), they charged their unfinished and beta versions so that people had to pay them. And when you realize that the full game was released still unfinished, it makes the whole thing even scummier.
- Inconsistent story filled with plot holes and bizarre contradictions that make zero sense to the context of the Sonic series and feel like they came from a Final Fantasy game, as many have compared this game to Sonic '06 in terms of how messy and poorly written the story is overall.
- There are also moments in the story where build-ups to the halfway point are completely absent and result in some parts of the story being unfinished and incredibly rushed at best.
- The game was released in an unfinished state with absolutely zero polish and numerous bugs and glitches that come out of nowhere in certain parts of the campaign, and considering that it uses an early version of a fan-made game engine that was abandoned with no patches to it, and also the developers having zero experience when it comes to quality control, it makes the game feel passionless with no effort put into it.
- The cutscenes are incredibly laughable and cheesy with bad voice acting, mediocre animation that looks like it was done in Source Filmmaker in only a week, several grammatical errors combined with severely poor dialogue, and the character models being rather jerky and stiff overall.
- Poor level design, with a lot of the hallway-like levels being unnecessarily huge and filled with rather badly designed platforming sections that tend to feel glitchy and broken at times due to the unfinished game engine, and since the game uses the Boost formula from Sonic Colors, Sonic Generations, Sonic Unleashed and Sonic Forces, it makes the levels feel like poor man's versions of the levels in Sonic Unleashed but without the charm of what made Unleashed a good game.
- Awful character physics and momentum, as both the main playable characters, Sonic and Shadow, have very wonky movement and control very poorly, as they tend to feel either too fast or too slow in certain parts of the levels. In some points of the game, they can easily glitch in some levels and can easily collide into enemies or death spikes due to their poor running acceleration and bad controls overall, and both of them are unplayable during certain parts of the game.
- Overabundance of unnecessary vehicle levels with Tails that are tedious to play through and complete at the end of the level, as the vehicles control very poorly and the shooting mechanics are very finicky when shooting at either objects or enemies and all of them are far worse than the vehicle levels in Shadow the Hedgehog and Sonic' 06 combined.
- Bland characters with shockingly zero development or growth in the story, and come off as plot devices that move the game along to its length, such as Chris Thorndyke (a character from the Sonic X anime series who is utterly despised by the Sonic community, mentioned in WIASO#18), who isn't in the story that often and is only used as a minor plot point in the game's story where he is told to be dead but is actually alive and has been aging far too quickly.
- The main villain, the Exiled, is a generic, over-the-top villain who acts way too similar to Infinite from Sonic Forces, and isn't very threatening in the slightest despite having a badass character design just like Infinite before him.
- The music was heavily plagiarized from other games and was remixed to sound like Sonic-style music, such as a track from the video game adaption of Cars 2 where it was used in one level that had a remixed rendition of it without crediting the composers of that track in the first place when BOLT should've just made original music instead.
- On the topic of the voice acting from WIASO#4, the voice acting is pretty bad due to most of the voice actors (except Nicholas Markgraf) pronouncing certain English words incorrectly due to English being their second language. In particular, Shadow was given an incredibly racist, stereotypical Russian accent that doesn't fit his voice and character at all, as an excuse to replace his old voice actor with a completely new one that tries to sound like him with his serious persona but fails due to the Russian accent poorly clashing with his character and makes him sound like his comedic parody from Balena Productions's web series, Sonic Zombies on YouTube. While Nicholas "Gameguynick" Markgraf does sound somewhat decent as Sonic himself (due to him being a professional voice actor and somewhat close to Jason Griffth's Sonic voice), some of his lines of dialogue need some work including "Going home, what a great motivation for genocide!", which is too cheery and lacks any sarcasm and "Consider this your bad Omen" (which is not only mocked by many others, but it makes no sense whatsoever), not to mention that there is no range whatsoever.
- Awful boss battles, as most of them are very poorly designed and have incredibly unpredictable attack patterns that can either be easy or hard to avoid and could obscure the player to their weak point, and some of them require tactics that are annoying to pull off to hit them at their weak point, which can make them rather painful to deal with in general.
- The boss with Maria also caused some controversy for utilizing a dead child as an opponent to fight since Maria is very young and is the granddaughter of Gerald Robotnik and Eggman's cousin, who was killed by GUN soldiers when Shadow was created. What's worse is that she has an underwear texture with "bad girl" printed on, which comes across as creepy, disturbing, and pedophilic!
- Shadow's Chaos abilities are incredibly nerfed to the point where it makes him the worst character in the game since they have low power and are hard to aim at certain enemies, and some of them are even fully required to get to certain parts of the levels which can be infuriating to many since Shadow has a bad playstyle and controls very badly, so trying to use Shadow and his powers to be able to progress through the game can get very frustrating at times.
- Wall Running has been completely ruined in this game thanks to the awful physics and bad controls, which can be annoying in some parts of the levels that have parts of them that require Wall Running since either Sonic or Shadow can fall off the walls very easily and fall towards their death or not make it to the Boost pads on time to progress to the next part of the level, making a lot of parts that have Wall Running unfair and overall cause Fake Difficulty.
- Terrible, uncontrollable camera that is locked in and moves automatically, but it doesn't respond properly with some areas of the game and can accidentally close in onto either Sonic or Shadow, which can cause some cheap deaths to happen at times.
- None of the original voice actors of the characters were paid at all and were scammed by the developers out of spite, only for Ouroboros Studio to replace them with new voice actors that sounded worse than the original voices that were provided by the original actors playing the characters, especially Shadow already mentioned above on WIASO#10, who again sounds like a racist Russian stereotype and sounds nothing like he does in the games.
- The game completely disrespects the source material. A large majority of the time many core aspects of Omens feels out-of-place for a Sonic the Hedgehog game, such as the more serious and plot-heavy story of the game, and the locations barely feel like they fit with the tone of the Sonic the Hedgehog series at all and feel more like they came straight out of the Halo franchise or DOOM for that matter.
- It is way inferior to the early 2020 demo that came out two years before it, as despite the demo being problematic, it still performed and played way better than the final version overall and had the true potential to be a good game, which sadly wasn't the case with the final version itself.
- The aforementioned Chris Thorndyke was given a terrible redesign in this game, as he now looks more like Sora from Kingdom Hearts and has only some similarities with his original design from the Sonic X anime series, due to him now being an adult and being much older in appearance, while the original Chris was a child/teenager in the anime, and the developer tried to intimate the older version of Chris in Season 2 but failed due to his lack of skill and knowledge of the Sonic the Hedgehog franchise.
- Frequent in-game crashes that often happen for no reason, due to the game being badly programmed and running on an unfinished game engine that received zero patches at all, especially during the aircraft missions where they tend to happen all the time, and can cause some occasional rage-quitting.
- The game relies too much on Fake Difficulty and Perfect Timing that it makes the game very dated and gimmicky, since many parts of the game have the player be pixel-perfect during the more platform-heavy levels with most of them requiring a leap of faith to complete, and half of the levels revolve around so much trial and error that it makes the game feel frustrating at times due to poor programming and the aforementioned bad level design that adds onto the unfair difficulty and overall terrible game design that many people have criticized the game for.
- While the graphics look beautiful, the lighting and rendering look very off and stilted at times, and has rather a dark shading that makes it look quite weak and unimpressive, which can make some places look either decent or extremely ugly and shallow, especially the forest levels and all of this is likely due to running on an unfinished game engine that received zero updates, and it shows, which can ruin the good graphics for some people.
- Similar to how Hunt Down the Freeman is to the Half-Life franchise, this game is a massive insult to the Sonic the Hedgehog series as a whole.
Redeeming Qualities
- The graphics are pretty good despite being made on an unfinished engine (which was imported on the Unreal Engine 5).
- Sonic's voice is somewhat decent and sounds close to Jason Griffith.
- In addition to his voice being somewhat decent, that also makes Sonic himself the least unlikable (or at least the most tolerable) character in this game since he still has his original personality for the most part.
- Despite most of it being plagiarized, the music is still one of the best parts of the game, and most of the remixes are amazing and fun to listen to overall.
- The song for the final boss, "The Weight of the World", has Bentley Jones in it who did songs in previous Sonic games.
- While not saying much, the update patch of this game, Update 3.2.0, did fix the problems in this game like many bugs in the levels, and fixed difficulties in the boss battles.
- Despite the Terrible Execution, The Mehanic for a Energy whip to swing over large gaps seemed like a Decent Idea for Sonic in his boost levels.
Reception
Back at its 2020 release, the game was highly praised mostly because of its graphics. However, Splash Dash said that the reason why the game received praise at first was because people didn't even play the game and said he did and said that the game sucked. He was criticized for being buggy, the awful level design, and poor controls.
Hype from people later died quickly when Ouroboros Studio, the developers of the game, revealed that they made a Patreon account for the game, which led to a lot of criticism because profiting from fan games is illegal. They then claimed that they don't use Patreon anymore, but at launch, they were exposed to secretly using one.
When the final episodes were released and everyone started to play, the game was heavily panned for the bizarre plot, multiple bugs and glitches, extremely hard boss battles, bad camera, and laughable dialogue.
The game was so infamous that it not only became the Hunt Down the Freeman of the Sonic franchise and overshadowed by the 16-bit fan remake of Sonic Triple Trouble, but it also made the fanbase apologize to Sonic Frontiers and when it was released in 2022 (the same year that Sonic Omens is also released) it was favored by many fanbases due to how it uses the large levels correctly, being an open-world game.
Trivia
- The game's infamy spawned the #OMENSSWEEP meme about the Morbius Sweep memes.
Videos
References
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