Omensight by the developer and publisher Spearhead Games; is a time-traveling adventure where players will hack-and-slash their way through enemy hordes of anthropomorphic beings as they look to stop the end of the world as they seek out the truth to what has caused it to happen.
Pros:
+An absolutely captivating art style that brings this animated-style game to life
+Some of the best sound design choices made to date
+Combat is fluid, even though it’s rather straightforward
+Revisiting stages over and over again is an absolute blast due to unlocking new areas as the game progresses
+Extremely strong character development throughout the game
Cons:
-Loadscreen lock-ups were infrequent but did exist
-Intermittently crashed when picking up health when a blow that shouldn’t have been fatal triggers death
-Fixed camera angles become quite problematic when platforming
Omensight from Spearhead Games is something unique in our current day and age. It’s a colorful, vibrant, and unique title that tells a story that we’ve experienced in one form or another, but somehow remains completely unique from those who have taken this approach before. It’s a game that will both surprise and astonish you every time you revisit an area you have been to once before.
In the world of Urrallia, which has been torn asunder by a war raging between the Pygarian Empire and the Rodentian resistance. As the flames of war tear the world asunder, you are cast into the role of a Harbinger, an entity that is called upon as a failsafe to prevent the end times from coming to. You’re, in essence, a Grim Reaper turned Time Lord; you’re the fourth horsemen in this game and your goal? To hunt down the priestess’ killers.
During your time as the Harbinger, you’ll move from various stages in the game, ultimately revisiting new portions of each of the previous areas, which actually expand on the games overall story as you hunt down information, clues, get into a few scuffles here and there, but also platforming your way through various areas while ultimately trying to figure out who killed the priestess, why they killed her, and ultimately decide how to end the war between the Pygarian’s and the Rodentian rebels.
But your ultimate goal isn’t necessarily stopping the priestesses death, but rather, stopping an apocalypse-inducing demon by the name of Voden from destroying the world. While the Harbinger herself isn’t near as fearsome as this massive foe, but what she can do, is just as powerful. She can relive the same twenty-four hours (queue some Bill Murray and his movie Groundhog day here) time-and-time again while looking for clues, hints, anything to give her information she needs in order to stop Voden from rising once again.
For the first couple of hours, you may notice something a bit off to some. The voice acting isn’t triple-A, but definitely enough to deserve a round of applause from this indie team and their well-focused ambition. The game, for all it’s worth, does come off a bit cliche and a bit cookie-cutter at first. Once past the introductory tidbits, something magical happened. A powerful and astonishing story began to emerge. Characters would begin to gain some depth and form their very own personalities, each coming with a genuine amount of detail, allowing them to become quite different from one another.
While the first few hours were quite trying, I did notice after a while I couldn’t stop playing. I wanted to know more about the Rodentian leader Ratika, I wanted to know more about this fearless leader of the Pygarian empire, Indrik, and I wanted to know more about the rest of the cast quite a bit more. I wanted to piece together every bit of the puzzle, I wanted to know what motivated each of these four unique characters into doing what they’ve done. I ultimately wanted to know how exactly my zigging-zagging and darting about across various timelines would pan out by the end of the game.
However, it wasn’t easy to where I’d gotten. First, you have to complete one pathway, one critical moment before rewinding and taking the other fork in the road in order to get the information needed. This means that sometimes, just sometimes, you would need to kill a character off for the greater good. Once done, a new pathway opened, new clues became available, and ultimately, my path of destruction could once more be rewound in order to correct all the unnecessary death that had already occurred.
The only downside point to this entire game? Combat is as basic as it gets. As you level up between reliving each day like the last bit never happened, you’ll notice only a few new abilities get introduced. Hit square or “X” to light attack, hit triangle or “Y” to use a heavy, and use your bumpers and triggers to use their assigned buttons. Dodging a foe’s attacks at just the right moment and you’ll quickly notice time coming to a screeching halt. However, even with the abilities such as the grab/throw mechanic, dodge, and time slow, combat is pretty standard and doesn’t do much to evolve outside of new foes and abilities that they have, which will require your muscle memory in order to avoid.
Unfortunately, combating your enemies does suffer a bit from troubling lock-on systems, which seem to rarely do their job when fighting massive hordes. Sadly, all of this isn’t necessarily at the games behest. Rather, it’s all exacerbated by an absolutely troubling camera fixed camera perspective, which forces the camera to continually be locked in a single direction. While there are moments you can turn the camera, you’ll more-often-than-not find yourself locked in a single direction.
Graphically and audibly, OMENSIGHT is an absolute masterpiece. Whether it’s the soft ambient touches to the game, oftentimes ranging from the soft flickering of torches, howls of wind in the distance, or the skittering of Cypher’s in the distance OMENSIGHTS sound design is some of the best on the market despite the game being a seemingly tight budget title. Even its score is rather well done, becoming rather catchy no matter how many times you hear a single track.
Tack on the fact that animations are beautiful, clean, fast, and highly detailed compared to most. Colors are vibrant, robust, and offer a clear image in this cel-shaded title and you have some eye-candy to enjoy. Every level, every character, all of them are well designed, each looking as if they were pulled from within a children’s fantasy book brought to life via digital media.
OMENSIGHT – PC and PS4
Developer: Spearhead Games
Publisher: Spearhead Games
Release Date: Now Available
Cost: $19.99
While flaws are few and far between, it can’t go without saying that some do exist. Sometimes a load screen would find itself stuck, never progressing and eventually requiring the game to be closed and restarted in order to resume where we’d once left off, sometimes forcing an entire map to be explored once again from the latest checkpoint the game had made. Another I’d encountered was healing up just moments before death and still being considered more dead than alive, which once again, led up to having to close the game and restarting once again.
But overall, OMENSIGHT is a charming game, one that welcomes gamers both young and old to enjoy what it has to offer. An intricate story, one that weaves itself through multiple narratives that eventually come together to create a charming story, one where players will feel satisfied once they’re done with the game. Mix it together with both its sound and art styles and OMENSIGHT does what the developer had intended. It stands as a spiritual successor to titles such as Majora’s Mask and the platformer-action hybrids that came before it.
Our review is based on a retail version that was provided to us by the game’s publisher. For information about our ethics policy please click here.
Final Score: 7 out of 10
About the Writer:
Dustin is our native console game reviewer who has an appetite for anything that crosses the borders from across the big pond. His interest in JRPGs, Anime, Handheld Gaming, and Pizza is insatiable. His elitist attitude gives him direction, want, and a need for the hardest difficulties in games, which is fun to watch, and hilarity at its finest. You can find him over on Twitter or Facebook.