I really want to hate this game. Like, you have no idea how much I wish I could say that I absolutely despised it, and to some extent, I did...but I didn't.

First things first though, lets start with the poopy caca garbage parts of this game. The tornado stages are absolutely abysmal, they control like shit, targeting the enemies is shit, it's unclear what you need to do in certain sections without looking it up, it's just a complete and utter shit show. It took me 20 minutes to beat the first Tornado stage, 30 to beat the second one, and over 30 to beat the last. That's approximately 1/6th of my playtime being wasted on a garbage attempt at a varying gameplay style that I have zero interest in revisiting of my own accord.

Next there's, stop me if you've heard this one before, the story. It's definitely ambitious in a lot of senses, and some individual moments are pretty cool when removed from the larger narrative it's trying to tell, because that larger narrative is a fucking disaster. I'll give it this, it's exactly the type of stupid story I'd expect out of a 2000's Sonic game, but that's not saying much because the plot itself SUCKS. However the voice acting, while pretty funny, isn't as much of an issue as I think people make it out to be, at least for me. Latino Shadow is the funniest shit ever to the point where I can't be mad at it, Eggman's rusty accent is weird yet oddly fitting, and the rest of the major characters do at least decent jobs. The one voice I actively don't vibe with is Sonic's, I understand his actor is trying to do a Jason Griffith impression and he doesn't outright do a terrible job at it, but like, IDK man it just feels wrong.

Now, this is as far as I'd heard the worst aspects of Omens, and they did not dissapoint, but the thing I'd heard the least about was the actual game behind it all, and when I played it, it was the most insane whiplash I've had in a long, long time. Even if I never outright performed excellently in any of the stages, something about the way they were designed, Sonic and Shadow's movesets or some other third thing clicked with me. I wanted to actively punch myself in the face in utter disbelief I was like "No this can't possibly be why the fuck am I having so much fun this is meant to be the bad Sonic fan game everyone bashes on and yet I'm having a blast what the fuck dude".

Worst part is, the praise doesn't end there, because the bosses, by some fucking miracle, are just as good as the levels. They're challenging and require an understanding of their patterns and your moveset, but they're never outright unfair, and that final conforntation with the Exiled is absolutely phenomenal as a Super Sonic final boss spectacle wise.

The art direction, while somewhat disjointed, looks great throughout the whole game and feels exactly like something you'd see in a sequel to Sonic Unleashed aiming for a more cartoony tone and yet managing to mantain the more real style of other Sonic games, and the music is stellar all throughout. Sure two of the songs are taken from other games and the fact a Cars 2 the game song is used in Area 99 will never not be funny, but every other track, both for cutscenes and in the actual game is fucking stellar, with the main theme Weight of the World becoming a new favorite of mine.

And I need you to understand, I absolutely hate myself for typing these words, like I am in complete and utter shock at myself for even thinking this, but it's simply how I feel, and I've learned to let my opinions not be fully influenced by whatever people say about a game. So as much as I hate it, and for as tight of a knot as I'll feel in my stomach after posting this...

I love Sonic Omens. I really, really do.

This fangame has been pretty much unanimously shat on in the sonic fandom as of its release, and is it deserved? Well, kind of.

This game nails THE most important thing for any sonic game, the controls/game feel. Running around with this game's physics and controls is great fun, the floaty boost allows for chaining enemies and boosting around with such freedom, it's great. The Infinity Engine obviously carries this game and is the main reason it is even remotely playable. After that, however, more or less everything else is far from perfect.

Before we can even get into the rest of the gameplay, the story; Since this is a fangame it of course has a lot of fanservice in it, which is great most of the time and starts off neat with little callbacks and nods to previous games. But this fanservice devolves into a crutch and the main plotline consists of 2 of these crutches. One ofwhich being linked to Sonic X and the other to Unleashed. Chris Thorndike and Chips bracelet are key pieces to this game's plot, but really make little sense without prior exposition and are just there for the sake of it, this can also be said about Marias bizarre appearance, the game tries to rewrite canon and retcon lore, but it just comes across really shabby to me.

This game also actually has fully animated and voiced cutscenes, and to its credit, the animation is stellar, I honestly don't think we've ever seen Sonic look this expressive in a non-pre-rendered environment before it looks fantastic. The facial expression can look a bit strange/overly animated for characters like Tails and Eggman, but Shadow and Sonic look amazing. However this is all for nought as the voice acting is ATROCIOUS, it drives these cutscenes and the story as a whole from pretty great to downright unwatchable. The only character I can stand listening to for more than 2 seconds is Exiled, who only shows up near the end. I will not go into detail for every performance but Sonic himself, which is honestly one of the LESS bad ones would you believe it or not, is just terrible. Every single line is read with the exact same delivery, it just reads off like a YouTuber doing a Jason Griffith impression for a voice reel or something, and a bad one at that.

The graphics are very divisive, to me I think it looks really good. I can understand the hate towards its artstyle as a'OMG SO REALISTIC SEGA HIRE THIS MAN RIGHT NOW' type of deal. But, eh, I like it and I could run it so I didn't care.(Apparently, people complain this game is optimised poorly but it ran fine for me) The UI on the other hand looks incredibly ugly, its clearly based on Forces, and I have to ask, why? Its so basic and bland compared to literally ANY other sonic UI, very disappointing.

The soundtrack is fine, nothing ear grading, nothing really great. It's just very generic, I can remember none of the songs in this game at all, which is quite a letdown for a Sonic game.

The level design is not good. Thankfully the great feel of the characters usually makes this a moot point, as even the most basic of level design is quite fun to blast through, but then they throw in monotonous platforming/combat sections. And they are also incredibly conservative with the boost gauge, it takes so many rings to fill and one little touch and it's all gone. They also gave Shadow a ton of Chaos attacks/powers which are so unnecessary and hardly ever used. Sonic also has a few extra things, and I did not even realise he had half his extra moves until I had already finished the game that's how unneeded and unutilised in the level design they were, the only times the powers are used are in arbitrary "This is the part of the level where you must stop what you are doing and use shadows chaos spear to hit a button" segments.

But, overall so far so good, amazing animations, fantastic game feel, hit-or-miss level design but shit voice acting. Oh, what's that? There's more?

Yes. For some baffling reason, they also added PLANE LEVELS. And let me tell you, they are total garbage and there are THREE of them! They are a complete pace breaker and just soo boring. You must slowly manoeuvre back and forth attacking and killing enemies to progress, making these sometimes the longest levels in the game. Despite having a large health UI, two little taps to the plane and your getting sent back to do it again, WHY? There is a huge health bar for no reason?? If you're going to add these stupid side modes (Which are mandatory) at least make them relatively easy/mindless. But no, have fun spending 15 minutes redoing the same section in a plane over and over.

And then, the bosses. Again, so. boring. You walk about until the boss is open, then you attack, and for some reason, every boss has a million health and you have a set amount of rings. It's not challenging, it is simply time-consuming because one little slip-up and you're all the way back to the start and you have to sit and wait for the boss to be open again. These are the worst types of boss designs in gaming and they are littered in this game.

The Plane and Boss segments of this game are by far the worst part and hugely diminish my enjoyment of playing the campaign, those alongside the few similar moments in the actual levels. Overall, a meh fangame with a fun engine and a bunch of shit extra stuff tagged on. Not that good, but definitely not the dumpster fire Twitter would have you believe it to be.

This game has really low lows, but the highs are so good that they make the game genuinely pretty fun for me lol

I didn't even like the game the first time I played it, but getting good and exploring the levels made me start to enjoy myself on even the levels I didn't, and it helps that I played the new update.

The actual core gameplay is ridiculously fun, especially with Shadow, who can use his Chaos Dash to skip huge sections of the level, and it's awesome.

There are these plane sections that are the worst thing ever, but I'm probably never going to touch them again.

Can't blame anyone for not liking it though, deaths can absolutely be unfair, it can be unclear what to do, some parts are just plainly poorly designed, and some parts are just awful, but when this game is at its peak, GODDAMN.

The visuals are pretty decent, better than Frontiers at the very least lol, feels like a 2014-15 Sonic game to come out in a world without a Lost World.

The OST is full of absolute bops.

The story is hilariously bad, like, it's genuinely the funniest thing ever, it's so bad.

Bosses are both really good and bad, there are some stinkers, but the good ones are really cool, despite their jank, lack of telegraphing, unfair hitboxes, etc., they're just satisfying to play.

I dunno, I'm not going to argue with someone who doesn't like it, hell, I BARELY like it, but as someone who goes back to games that I don't like, this one definitely gets more fun on replays, and I will absolutely come back to its peak moments.

I can't explain it, but it feels to good to play a difficult Sonic game, even if that difficulty is BS the time.

I don't recommend it if you don't plan on replaying to get good, hell, I recommend Frontiers WAY more than this game, but I have more reason to come back to Omens.

I played this expecting to hate it but I was pleasantly surprised (somewhat).
I think the main Sonic/Shadow stages were generally enjoyable, I liked how Sonic and Shadow controlled and the levels themselves were big, open and let you experiment with the physics a lot and I mostly had fun playing them at least when they weren't full of annoying trial and error insta-deaths, Shadow's gameplay was a bit gimmicky for my liking but nothing too egregious.
Too bad I can't say the same for those bloody plane levels, good god they were awful, just what I want when playing a Sonic game, long boring segments where I'm slowly flying around trying not to bump into something that will insta-kill me while trying to snipe an enemy that will also insta-kill me if I get too close!
These levels were so bad that I couldn't be bothered to make it to the end of the game and fight the supposedly awful final boss, whoever approved this needs to be kicked in the balls.

UPDATE:
I have since downloaded a completed save file that allowed me to skip the god awful flying stages, turns out I didn't miss much, a poorly designed Sonic stage and some crap bosses, avoid it and save the 8gb of space.

Relevando muitos probleminhas menores por ser um fan game, eu gostei do resultado final. Deu pra ver que colocaram muito carinho no projeto e, se tivessem, um orçamento decente e tempo de produção, com certeza resultaria em um jogo excelente. Gostei do que fizeram com a gameplay do Shadow, diferenciaram ele do Sonic de um jeito interessante, apesar de eu achar que ainda dá pra melhorar bastante, considero como um mérito por se algo que a Sonic Team nunca conseguiu fazer direito. As fases de nave do Tails são terríveis, mas jogáveis, o restante é bem legal, a trilha sonora é excelente, a dublagem é daora, os personagens são bem trabalhados, tudo bem divertido. Recomendo pra quem é fã da série, vale a pena olhar como as coisas poderiam ser com outra perspectiva que não seja dos engravatados da Sega.