'Omega Rising' by Joshua Dalzelle
'Omega Rising' by Joshua Dalzelle

The good

  • A fun premise: a spaceship crashes on earth, a guy goes to investigate, and gets pulled into an interstellar adventure.

  • Fast paced with some fun action.

  • The characters are mostly fun, despite being a little shallow.

  • A decent ending that leaves a good setup for future adventures.

The not so good

  • There are a lot of clichés: the robot that wants to be free; the US military grunt who is all about freedom and guns; the aliens who are almost all roughly human-sized and human-shaped; the “badass team” that has one leader (a white guy, of course), one big guy who is the enforcer, one weaker guy who is the mechanic, and so on.

  • The writing is a bit bland and lacks subtlety. There are some things that you shouldn’t just outright say; they work better if you hint at them, or better yet, show them (show, don’t tell).

Rating: 3.5 stars