Boy, this demo is rough. The opening levels have some promise, and I actually enjoyed learning to S-Rank Area 99, but things immediately nose-dive with Wild Ridge and never really improve after that. Wild Ridge fails because of awkward plane controls and overly-punishing obstacles, and White Jungle is a round hole that the developer is trying to shove the square peg that is the Infinity Engine into. The levels after that moreso suffer from poor conveyance of direction and pacing. Exploring can get me lost, and trying to go fast can get me killed.

The game is still in development though, so could it improve? I don't know. It looks like they're only making the later levels now, and seeing their ideas for how to make Sonic levels more difficult doesn't fill me with hope.

Edit: The final game is out. It did not improve.

I didn’t realize this was on backloggd recently but now that I do I can finally give my full thoughts on this…uh…experience.

Sonic Omens is dreadful. I’m not gonna get into the whole Patreon debacle and instead I’m just gonna focus exclusively on the game’s mechanics and level design. Figure I could keep the focus of critiques narrowed that way.

First off, the controls are awful. Sonic’s steering is way too loose and sensitive making precise inputs a chore, His jump arc feels sluggish and slow, and overall there’s just not much to his moveset. It tries to mesh boost gameplay with Adventure gameplay but it just doesn’t work at all. It feels too all over the place and floaty compared to the responsive rock solid controls of Adventure, and it doesn’t have the tight handling and sense of weight and fluidity that the boost games have. It’s a jack of all trades and master of none. The homing attack is terrible because of how you can only use it when the camera faces an object, so often times you’ll be standing right in front of a spring or an enemy hitting the A button (if you’re using a gamepad like I am) but because the camera isn’t fixated in just the right spot, you won’t lock on to it. Sonic has this new enderbeam-esc ability that flings him into the air but for the most part it’s borderline pointless because the airboost is absurdly overpowered. You can no joke just airboost superman jump over like half the stage and the game just allows it because “WHOA LOOK HOW COOL DIS LOOKS SONIC’S GOIN SO FAST BEST GAME EVAR!!!!!!”. The only thing I like with these controls is the ability to continue a homing attack chain after an airboost, but other than that, it’s just not intuitive at all and doesn’t feel good to use. The plane controls are self explanatory with how bad they are, clunky loose handling with boring shooting based gameplay and obstacle courses that don’t lend these controls any favors either. Then you have Shadow. He’s basically like Sonic except he has Chaos powers that you can swap between with the Dpad, but DMC style switching this ain’t. Chaos Dash is probably the only useful one as it can propel you upward and can skip specific platforming sections, although the game never really explains how to pull this off, otherwise it’s a middle of the road airdash that kills your speed, Chaos Blast is only useful in boring enemy rooms (which yes, thank you Sonic Omens, that’s DEFINITELY what Sonic as a franchise needed more of!), Chaos Spear is a projectile attack that’s a nightmare to position and aim correctly and who’s only purpose is to hit switches, and Chaos Control, a time slowing ability that also slows the speed at which your camera turns. It’s pretty hilarious.

The level design is atrocious. A lot of it is big just for the sake of being big without adding anything meaningful to it, giving it the illusion that it’s more expansive than it actually is. For example, there’s a section near the first water running area in Chao Paradise where if you venture off to the right there’s just this entire empty space full of nothing who’s only purpose is to house a single red ring and nothing else. After you get it, that area ceases to have any sort of purpose. The entire game is flooded with examples like this, or moreover the game will have like 2 simple rather primitively designed pathways to choose from but because they’re wide and big you get people going “YEAH I LIKE IT BECAUSE IT’S BIG!!!” The platforming is unbelievably simplistic, pace breaking, and doesn’t work well with these controls at all, the later half of this project has an over abundance of hitting switches and killing enemies instead of the shallow spectacle filled high speed it lures you with in the first half. The giant tree level is possibly the worst level in the entire game no question, confusing layout, awful platforming, boring puzzles, an over abundance of store bought assets copy pasted everywhere with no thought for artistic cohesion, it’s a giant mess.

And that’s all this game is. It has controls designed for you to skip huge chunks of the stage combined with wishy wooshy “SUPAH COOL” particle effects bloom motion blur and camera shaking to make it look like it’s more impressive than it actually is. It’s the textbook definition of “style over substance”. The bosses are godawful as well, the first one is an arena fight with a boss that takes forever to kill and has egg pawns blindside you because you can’t see them coming with how the camera focuses exclusively on the boss at all times (and thus the homing attack doesn’t even work against these Egg pawns either), the 2nd one is in the plane and it has no intuitive way of knowing where it’s going to attack or when, partially because everything is covered up with a hideous sandstorm effect, and the final one is just “mash A and win” and I’m not even kidding. The voice acting is horrendous, Sonic badly tries to imitate Jason Griffith’s over exaggerated obnoxious performance (of which I’m also not a fan of), and Tails and Shadow don’t even sound like native English speakers, Shadow DISTRACTINGLY so. And please don’t give me the tired excuse of “it’s a fangame therefore you can’t criticize it or be harsh with it” as if fangames are somehow exempt of criticism, especially with how everyone was sucking this game off big time when it resurfaced and claimed it was “da best sonic game/fangame ever!!!”, then I’m gonna judge it as such, simple as that. This one isn’t even worth downloading unless you really want to make yourself physically ill.

I don't often find myself getting angry at a game, but this game did it. Every interesting or cool idea the game has is wasted on it. The level design is truly atrocious and hair-tearingly unfair, even as a Sonic veteran.

Even to put all the controversy with the devs aside, this game blunders in so many mind-blowing ways. The camera during bosses is also another sore point for me, as it focuses on the player character instead of the boss itself making for an excruciating number of blindsided hits and deaths.

Don't waste your time, even for morbid curiosity.

动态网自由门 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 sonic omens 六四天安門事件 tails tornado 天安門大屠殺 chris sonic x 反右派鬥爭 The Anti-Rightist Struggle 大躍進政策 exiled that was your bad omen 文化大革命 The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 人權 Human Rights 民運 Democratization 自由 Freedom 獨立 Independence 多黨制 Multi-party system 台灣 臺灣 the devs sexualised a 12 year old girl in the internal files 中華民國 Republic of China 西藏 土伯特 唐古特 Tibet 達賴喇嘛 tails voice 法輪功 Falun Dafa 新疆維吾爾自治區 The Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region 諾貝爾和平獎 Nobel Peace Prize 劉暁波 christopher tombstone 民主 言論 思想 反共 反革命 抗議 運動 騷亂 暴亂 騷擾 擾亂 抗暴 平反 維權 示威游行 李洪志 法輪大法 大法弟子 強制斷種 強制堕胎 民族淨化 人體實驗 肅清 胡耀邦 趙紫陽 魏京生 王丹 還政於民 和平演變 激流中國 北京之春 大紀元時報 九評論共産黨 獨裁 專制 壓制 統一 監視 鎮壓 迫害 侵略 掠奪 破壞 拷問 屠殺 活摘器官 誘拐 買賣人口 遊進 走私 毒品 賣淫 春畫 賭博 六合彩 天安門 天安门 法輪功 李洪志 Winnie the Pooh 劉曉波动态网自由门

A rather fun time with a lot of promise and really high production values.

As a note, I played the entire game on fucking keyboard and mouse which I dont really recommend, the experience got much better after I used an Xbox controller after getting one a few weeks later lol.

I think a lot of the level design is really fun and well designed, especially the first stage and Area 99. Those stages in particular had great ideas and execution and if everything in the game is what they promise, I'm completely on board. Some of the later stages have some questionable choices, Shadow's stop and start chaos ability usage, and a largely vertical stage that wasn't the best being the biggest offenders.

A lot of the bosses were good as well, with the busted Egg Dragoon being especially worth mentioning. As despite it being a difficult fight that will give you some shit, it's entirely fair, due to all of its attacks having half a year of leadup to give ample time to dodge.

I've seen reports of the game being a bit buggy, and even seen a tweet or two that had glitches, but I ultimately didn't have any encounters myself around a collective, probably 5 hours of playing.

Overall, this was a fun time and I'm interested to see what the devs plan to put out.

Also, regarding the situation of them having accepted money to work on the fangame. When you come from a community such as the Touhou fanbase where fanworks are not only allowed to be created, but also be SOLD at physical festivals and EVEN online storefronts with no issue, and when all it's done is help and make the community flourish: a group of people trying to make a high quality Sonic fangame with the OPTION to donate money to them really does not seem as evil or scummy as some would lead you to believe. However after the recent statement by a worker at SEGA themselves, I think it best they stop taking any and all donations regarding Omens. I still don't think the act of the donations in of themselves makes them some horrible greedy sleazy fucks as some pushed.

Man the only redeeming quality this game has is that maybe the first two Sonic stages are kind of fun, and show the potential that a game like this has.

Everything else is total hot garbage though. The Tails plane levels, the shitty tree stages (both of them), Shadow's godawful platforming stages, and especially the boss fights. It all just controls terribly, plays terribly, and is not executed well at all.

The visuals are very nice I'll admit, but that's most of what this game has going for it. Despite all the praise I see for this game on Youtube videos, I'm convinced everyone in those comment sections hasn't actually tried playing this game.

I'd literally rather fucking play Sonic Forces. At least that game is competently designed, even if a little bland.

I know it feels weird to go harsh on a fangame, but since so many people tout this as "better than what Sonic Team can do", it deserves it.

I am a very strong believer in the idea that the fans are the future of Sonic. I don’t think this in a cynical “Sonic Team is so incompetent that the fans need to make the good games themselves” kind of way, but in a way that their optimism and excitement for Sonic can come shining through in what they make. Even the more flawed ones have an endless stream of passion to them. That always makes me glad that I experienced them regardless. Despite everything, the Sonic fanbase is so wonderful and creative that I can’t help but be optimistic for what comes from it.

To say I don’t feel any of that passion from Sonic Omens is mincing words. It feels like it’s actively spitting in the face of that optimism I described. It’s flat-out abusing the good will that comes from fan games all to line their own pockets using an IP that they do not own. (Which could also potentially put other fan games in jeopardy if Sega does try to take action against them for heavily monetizing the project) Knowing the sheer volume of harassment and attempted censorship that came from Ouroboros Studio surrounding the game disgusts me beyond words. This document right here provides more information on what’s been going on behind the scenes with this game than I could describe or feel comfortable describing.

The bottom line is: do not support this game whatsoever. There’s a whole world of Sonic fangames with so much more genuine passion for the franchise than this piece of shit could ever pretend to have. It’s the most sickened I’ve been by a project in a while.

Sega are these the men you want to hire?

Look I just don't even know where to begin, Sonic Omens is awful like i normally want to be somewhat positive and give a game the benefit of the doubt but no man, this game is bad, like shockingly so, it's genuinely baffling to me how any game releases as this, and I'm gonna talk about it today.

This review is gonna be split in two, talking about the devs and the game itself so strap in folks because this is gonna be wild.

The Dodgy Development

Okay let's get this over with, the developers are poopy shitheads, if you want more on their wacky antics check this doc here but in short, they sexualised a minor, had beta builds hidden behind a paywall subscription on Patreon, stole the How to Train Your Dragon IP as their own, have ads on Game Jolt with an insane amount of Traffic, alleged stealing from Cars 2: The Video Game (the most evil thing here, seriously of all games to steal music from why the tie-in game to a bad film) and passing it as their own and Bolt/Joh being asshats and causing drama on Twitter, devs and fans bullying people who worked on the game, plus a plethora of other heinous stuff, so if you don't want to play this (I don't know why you would) then look here, I'm not focusing on it as i feel the game itself is more important to me but i cannot ignore the development of this game since it gives context to my experience with this game plus Midrulean already went somewhat in depth with the development so go check out his review if you haven't already.

Sonic Omens and the Cost of Ambition

Being Ambitious means you have to live up to people's justifiably high expectations, if you don't deliver you have big bag of wasted potential, many games do this but none so much as Sonic Omens, this game is awful, it's trying to be something it clearly can't be due to the humongous scope and clueless people working on it and yet it's so desperately trying be something it can't, a good game. But seriously, everything around this game can be seen through how ambitious it is, wanting to be a modern 2000s styled Sonic Adventure that serves as competition to Sonic's next Open-Zone game, and it fails spectacularly, what started as a ambitious quaint little fangame in 2020 that while flawed showed some promise made out of passion has ended up becoming show detested, reviled and contropassion finished out of spite.

I haven't heard many people talk about the story but wow it is messy despite a more simple premise, it's trying to be a surrogate game to the 2000s but doesn't work, like it's essentially comes to referencing it and not making an interesting story around it's concepts, it weirdly has some X stuff involved which is funny since they want me to care about X in a Mainline setting and a whole heap of forced references to make the meta era haters go "Awooga this game is great!" like the story has a super sonic final boss, The Metarex, Gaia Temples, Song cues from X and other games, Chip and Chris stuff, Shadaw, Maria, Rouge, Knuckles, the Tornado from X, Big cameos, G.U.N, music from Shadow and so much more. It's admirable i guess but is absolutely shattered by the Voice Acting, I can at least admire the people trying they're hardest since you can very much tell they aren't native english speakers but wow they couldn't have hired some other people? Delivery feels stiff and wooden and are trying so hard to replicate the 4kids cast but fail so hard, mostly with Shadow and Eggman. The dialogue also feels pretty clunky which isn't helped by the awkard delivery since you can barely understand what they're saying sometimes. One thing this game's plot attempts to do is explain why the Chaos Emeralds aren't used in mainline entires plot wise, placing this between after Unleashed and before Lost World… Did they even play the games? Barring Gens using the emeralds as the driving force of the plots they never really had a reason to use them in the plot because it'll boil down to a boring played out macguffin hunt which this game kinda is, so overall i don't see why the plot played this angle if they don't do anything interesting or compelling with it but the mediocre story is the least of our worries.

Presentation wise, Omens is very admirable though still not all that great when it comes to this, one thing I can't complain about is the Music because it's really great, using a lot of stuff in the 2000s, it isn't original but good nonetheless, i also like the character animation despite some stiff moments but it's very expressive for the most part especially with Sonic, but that's where a lot of my postives end with this game for me, the game for one is very glitchy and poorly optimized, frequent pop-in, clipping into objects, floating in the air, camera getting stuck on stuff, respawn not working, collision issues, game freezes/crashes and no sfx playing at one point but the visuals while do look decent some original characters and environments don't look very sonic like and seem like they're plopped fron radically different game plus the framerate isn't very smooth, it isn't my PC since the one i played on is pretty strong so i feel this is on the developers part.

But yeah I know, I've been trying to avoid but Sonic Omens has got to be one of the worst gameplay experiences I've ever had, this game is trying to be more like Unleashed and maybe a bit of Generations in terms of mechanics but feels like Forces 2 in this regard. Sonic controls way too slippery and his jump is too limiting making platform into a chore, he has a lot of moves from the previous games like the bonuce which was welcome, light speed dash, stomp and the boost with a screen nuke and a grappling hook plus a plethora of Chaos abilities for Shadow but they aren't put to good use, i feel the lack of a drift function hurts this game even more than Forces since they're some very sharp turns that you sure as hell can't pull with the base movement, the boost meter depletes too quickly leading to moments where you a searching for rings and boost orbs.

This wouldn't be an issue if it wasn't for the god awful level design (I mean if the game tells you that you need to respawn frequently then you're in for a treat), Disney's Bolt and his team decide too pull a Balan Wonderworld and use 2 completely near incompatible gameplay styles into one, this is time with Boost and Adventure level design, what you have are the most inexplicably open, spectacle relient and boring stages ever concived in a Sonic game, It's laughable how confusing the levels are, I don't know where I'm going most of the time only to have a giant arrow pointing to where I am, toppped with the controls, the levels utterly become both frustrating, confusing and boring all at once, death zones don't even make sense at points, when the game tries to pull force combat it takes way too long, Shadow's stages are way worse given how the destroy the pace of each stage using chaos powers and you can even get softlocked at points just again you can tell they wanted to do so many things with this game but it utterly falls flat on it's entire body, I was gonna do an episode by episode review of this game but what's the point? I'd be blabbering saying the exact same stuff about the levels since the marginally get better, the low point of the levels are the latter half of Episode 3 where they focus on the water parts, and now there's a very good reason why most sonic games don't have 3d water levels, You're scalling up this big tree and this was one of the breaking points for me, you have to be very precise with the platforming, almost too precise with the general structure of the tree just being annoying and monotonous especially with the water, switch and aforementioned control issues, when i lost nearly 30 Minutes of progress by a mistaken homing attack i just gave up and used a save file, this game does not respect your time and I won't either so i wanted to see if it got any better and it did, barely, the 3rd Episode as whole isn't great especially with the water escape sequence, good lord that was horrible especially with the amount of near unavoidable death zones you have in this, making you really wonder if they properly playtested this game and fixed the issues many people already had but no they barely did. But i mean when a lot of the unfair BS is over with Omens is as good as Forces worst moments so that's something i guess, I'd say Episode 1 is solid enough and Area 99 (nice X reference) is too but they have their fair share of BS and what i like to call OH WOW LOOK AT DA BLOOM AND THE SPECTACLE WOW THIS GAME IS GOOD like seriously it's in every level and I don't get why.

But i mean i would have rated this game a 3 maybe even 4/10 if it was just the levels… Then the Bosses and Tornado sections come in, seriously every single Boss is awful especially the final boss, way too long, the camera doesn't focus on them, bullshit insta kill moves, awful pacing, severe lack of rings in them and overall just not a fun time, I don't feel like i overcame a good challenge i feel relived that i don't have to undergo a painful experience.

And finally the crown shit jewel of this game, the Tornado sections. Just what the hell happened? The Tornado moves way too slow especially in reverse and moving upwards, the blaster does some pitful damage, the missles while can do some damage don't go far, Boosting has a risk reward system where you move faster but when you hit something you get damaged even more which is piled by the horrendous design which is the shining example of everything this game gets wrong, confusing because of how the world design and controls, boring because of how the Tornado feels and frustrating because of how the enemies have the giant near unavoidable laser and the entire 2nd Act of the Escape sequence due to the worm, truly one of the worst experiences I've ever had the pleasure of playing in a video game, I must apologize to Balan Wonderworld because at least that game was consistent in it's awfulness and never came close to this.

Conclusion
This game is awful, i put this game in my least favourite games list but removed it but i think Apollo Justice will be execused (for now) but i could just conclude saying "game bad bye bye now" but going back to the start of this review, the cost of ambition pays a heavy toll, every issue this game faces is linked due to ambition, the 2000s esque story, the next-gen presentation, advancing and expanding the boost gameplay, the Bosses and Tornado being more elaborate and in-depth than ever before, all linked due to the ambition this game wants to do and it would be if the developers weren't assholes and the game wasn't this horrible, like yeah it's somewhat impressive to have a near 3d sonic console game made by fans but Sonic GT beat them to it and is way better, so i don't think i even need to say why you shouldn't waste 14GB on this game and play many other Sonic fangames, mainly the Spark Trilogy and Sonic GT, that being said:

Game bad bye bye now

After playing this game in full now that it has been finished, I can now say that this fangame still sucks ass and it's just poorly designed in almost every way. The first two levels (with the exception of the tutorial) you play are decent but the game drops down in quality fast later on. Horrible game design, horrible gameplay and mechanics, bad voice acting, bad storywriting and Infinity Engine is just poorly optimized and messy in coding. There was no testing when making this game.
Anyone who unironically defends Omens and thinks it's better than most official Sonic titles should never play video games ever again. I refuse to believe these people even exist.