IS IT WORTH IT?! | A Review of Genesis Alpha One in About 3 Minutes!
534A detailed review of Genesis Alpha One in about 3 minutes. We make game reviews without the fluff.
Genesis Alpha One is an addictive and unforgiving first person rogue-like game set in space, where you take on the role of a captain tasked with building a ship and expanding your crew of clones in order to find a suitable planet for humanity to colonize called a genesis planet, but between the hazardous asteroids fields, infestations and pirates, combined with an overall lack of polish, the game certainly doesn't make it easy but it's actually pretty good!
At first it can be abit overwhelming as the tutorial throws alot of info at you in a very short amount of time, just like this video is doing to you right now, but I really started enjoying myself after the first few hours once I learned how everything worked and what exactly I was supposed to be doing.
You start out in space with a minimal crew and only the bare essentials on your ship like the greenhouse which houses plants that provide a breathable atmosphere for you and your crew, and living quarters for everyone onboard but once you start gathering resources by going on away missions to nearby planets and using the tractor beam to rummage through debris floating in space, you can start building additional rooms that increase your ships capabilities such as shields and hyperdrive engines.
The away missions take place within a fairly small shielded area surrounding the drop ship and endless waves of enemies try to attack you as you mine for resources which keeps you on your toes. You can assign up to 4 crew members to follow you down to the surface or you can stay behind and just send them to collect resources on their own.
You navigate the ship using a 2D map on the bridge which shows the locations of solar systems with planets that might contain valuable resources, aswell as potential threats like pirate ships and areas with alot of asteroids that can severely damage the ship.
Your AI crew members can be assigned to each room to carry out tasks such as refining raw materials and making ammo and by building a combination of corridors and rooms you can freely design the layout of your ship and can even spread it out vertically across upto 6 decks, although strategy plays a key role in ship design as it can be boarded by pirates and infested by alien spiders and mushrooms that emit poisonous gases that make your crew sick so you need to build it strategetically so it's as easy as possible to defend.
The crew is made up entirely of clones that you create using biomass which drops as loot from most enemies you kill. Enemies can also drop DNA samples which you can mix with human DNA to create half man, half spider people in the cloning facility, with each species needing different chemicals in the air to be able to breath on your ship.
Even the captain is a clone which means if you die then you take over the body of another clone, but if there's no crew left alive then it's game over and you have to start again.
The graphics, sounds, physics and animations are all average at best, and the weapons lack even basic reload animations which is dissapointing for a fully released title, but on the plus side there's a decent variety of guns in the game like laser rifles and a grenade launcher aswell as a couple based on their real life counterparts like the spas 12 and SA80.
The AI can be abit derpy, often just running straight towards you as you gun them down one after the other, and seeing my crewmates trying to hit a spider with a 12 gauge shotgun as it gnaws on their foot less than 2 meters away was painful to watch and resulted in a few lost crew members over my 40 hours playtime, and yet despite its obvious lack of polish I actually really enjoyed it!
Building up the ship and sending the crew down to planets to collect resources is fun, invading enemy ships to steal their biomass and kill their captain can be really exciting and I learned to design the layout of my ship in a way that made it easier to defend. It's a really unique game with alot of replayability and I definately recommend giving it a try if you don't mind a game that makes up in gameplay, immersion and challenge what it lacks in visual effects!
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Genesis Alpha One
https://store.steampowered.com/app/712190/Genesis_Alpha_One_Deluxe_Edition/
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