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Earth's Doom

Earth’s Doom
by SARCASTIC_FL0WER

The first sentence of the blurb is perfect: it adds a sense of mystery and catches the reader’s attention by making them ask questions. While I did like the beginning of the blurb very much, I honestly found some of the latter sentences a bit confusing. Some errors need to be corrected. The cover baffled me a bit since I saw an almost identical cover before, with the same image used. I didn’t have a problem with that, only that I do not think it fits the story.

There are grammatical mistakes, but they are not too distracting (for example, the author mixed the past and present tense throughout the story, misused prepositions and question tags, and occasionally used awkward nouns/noun forms). The errors are noticeable, but they don’t make it impossible to understand the story.

What I found much more distracting is the writing style. The entire time I had a feeling I was reading a comic book in novel form; with sound effects and short descriptions, the story is, for the most part, told through dialogue. I do not think this is a bad thing, I think it would be interesting to read a story like that, but the execution didn’t do it justice. I wish that, instead of using sound effects such as ‘Roar’ and ‘Thud’, the author described these sounds. As the story progresses, though, the ‘sound effects’ become less frequent, and the descriptions get longer. 

Also, at the beginning of the third chapter, there is a sudden person shift: narration goes from first to third-person without any disclaimer only to return to first-person, then goes back to third-person, finishing the chapter, again, with first-person. I could see that the author did so purposefully, but I did not like it. It is, in my opinion, messy and needless. This is repeated in later chapters as well.

When it comes to the plot, I would say it is interesting. I liked how the story started and how we got to piece it together.Still, I think the pacing was a bit too fast. It felt like the author was throwing out information instead of giving me a piece at the time. The characters are also two-dimensional; their motives remained unclear to me. There is no true character development in the first nine chapters: we are told about the characters' feelings and the changes thereof without understanding the reasons behind them.

All in all, I do not think that the story is bad, only that it needs to be worked on. Isekai stories are pretty popular nowadays, so with proper editing, I think it could become popular.