shame, could have been so much better

production is aweful, reading by narrator is bizarre in places, writing is poor, but cost me nothing so got what I paid for

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Ringing noise

I was interested in this going off reviews and sample. only made it through 7 chapters before I had to return the book. there is a ringing noise throughout which stops sometimes for a short time then starts again which made it very difficult to concentrate.

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It's certainly long...

The Darkslayer Omnibus is a strange and expansive story, at times feeling like a sprawling roleplay campaign written by its players. Its characters are heroic archetypes in a novel world which Halloran clearly loves.

The societies, crudely sketched to start with, do get fleshed out as the stories progress and Halloran uses some interesting magical items that engage the audience's curiosity. I'd certainly be interested to see how the more powerful artefacts are used in different characters' hands.

The main setback to my enjoyment was the poor editing, which magnified the frequently disjointed & strained narration. Otherwise, here's the trigger warning, there are sustained scenes of sexual violence against women which makes it inappropriate for younger listener's while others may wish to avoid this content. In contrast, male protagonists seemingly shrug off the effects of torture and violence against them as if acknowledging mutilation is unmasculine.

Outside of what I presume is the author's intent to create a "gritty and darkly realistic" world you should
prepare yourself for light fantasy and suspend your disbelief for the characters' implausible adventures.

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Reading these reviews - this is like Marmite!!!

First things first - I have listened to this epic 86+ hours and absolutely loved it. If you like fantasy, magic, proper hero vs villain sagas then you will love the books - there are more cliffhangers and resurrections in these books than any I've read before and for the last couple of months this has been a great entertainment.
Now - the narrator gets a bit of a slating in these reviews .... but, his mispronunciation of certain words and the pregnant pauses in the middle of sentences (where I think he's turning a page 🤣) is simply part of the entertainment !!! Just go with it - his voices and accents for each of the characters are endearing and I'm genuinely quite sad that this is now over.
All I can say is that for 1 credit to get 86 hours is pretty awesome - stick with it and just chuckle at the mistakes xxx

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My thoughts

This might have been a great omnibus , but it was let down by the delay between chapters but the main problem was the bloody stupid sound effects with was so bloody annoying and for that reason I rated this low

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5 people found this helpful

Worst audio book I’ve listened to so far

The theatrical approach to the narration of this book did not resonate with me. I recommend listening to the sample before downloading the book.

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I really want to rate this series higher

Overall there are so many interesting story points and characters in these books with the narrator seemingly putting in loads of effort, but I just can't give it a high rating due to it's failings.

Negative:
The narrator doesn't seem to utilise normal human inflections when reading. There are so many pauses in between words that confuse or change the flow of the sentence. For example one sentence was read "they reached..... the edge..... of the forest" the pauses really feel like they're for dramatic effect until you slowly realise that they just seem to be everywhere without concern for the impact they have on the flow of the story.
There are numerous mispronunciations of words, some recurring such as "chimera" and others minor that really impact on the scene being portrayed. And as stated in a few other reviews there's a high pitched buzz in the background for most of this recording.

Most of the characters are similar, warriors fighting all the time. I felt like the story also included a lot of racist undertones, and not just with human characters. It seemed like dark skinned characters were frequently referred to as such, for example "... said the large black man" and "his dark skin shone", while there's nothing wrong with these descriptions I noticed it a lot with very little comment about pale skined characters. This seemed to be compounded by referring to non human characters by what seemed like racial slurs 'dog-faced gnoll' was used very frequently.
There is also the same catch-phrase repeated during the story about a thousand times, which gets a bit tiring.

Positive:
The narrator seemed to put a load of effort into this book, with loads of sound effects and even background music which was really great for atmosphere in the majority of the audiobook. Some of the character voices were really interesting too.

The book has some really interesting story points and character points with some side characters being really captivating while they are in the story.

The main positive is this one audiobook is really long and lasted me over a month with approximately 30 mins listening a day.

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4 people found this helpful

Disappointed

Great story concept but poorly written and not very well narrated. It would seem this was written for ages 5 to 10. There is a complete disconnect between plots and characters' personalities change from o e chapter to the next, making it impossible to connect to them. It feels like twists in the story were written to fill space.

Not an enjoyable read.

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don't bother

Made it through the first book, not sure which was worst the narrator or the lack of a story/writing style.

I could not do any better and my only reason for writing this is that I feel I wasted more time listening to this book and feel the comments do not reflect the book I listened to.

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1 person found this helpful

not great

I did want to enjoy this but the further it went to worse it got. the main characters, and there is quite a few, spend a lot of time whining and are mostly unlikeable. The main character Vanir is basically useless and spends more time getting mutilated,tied up and beaten than actually doing anything, always getting beaten even though he's supposed to get bigger and stronger. Also having 8 different scenarios running at once isn't a great idea as by the time it Jumps back to the first one you have almost forgotten what was happening. the narrator isn't great, pausing in strange place like "he didn't know what to..........do" also makes every female sound like an old hag and don't let start on the 'screams' and 'yells'. I sadly cannot recommend.

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