Genesis Alpha One is an incredibly ambitious indie title – pairing a roguelike formula with space exploration, cloning, ship building and first person combat. It’s an exciting concept on paper, however the game unfortunately manages to miss the mark in numerous crucial all-important areas.

After the collapse of Earth, the game puts you in the shoes of the captain of a ship looking to find a new home for humanity (and other forms of life). The game allows the player to seamlessly jump between top-down ship building and first person exploration and combat.

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Beginning the game you’ll pick a corporation which offers varying different starting benefits such as alternate weapons, buildings or artefacts. You’ll then form your initial crew from a selection of around 10 different species (beginning with Humans), each with their own positives and negatives such as health, intelligence and damage resistance. These species must first be uncovered and unlocked by successfully colonising a planet with over half your colony containing that species.

The game actually does a fairly decent job of explaining each of the building mechanics and systems via regular tooltips and prompts. Whilst there is a tutorial on offer to ease you into the game, in my opinion jumping right in offered a far more engaging experience. In fact the first hour or so with the game’s tutorial completely soured me on things. After beginning a new playthrough with my own custom starting selections and throwing myself into the deep end I quickly picked up the game’s mechanics, finding it a far more enjoyable experience overall.

You can build and improve your ship at any point when on board with a single button press. Doing so takes you to a top-down perspective of the ship, where you can view your current resources and select different rooms to construct. Rooms are constructed instantly and the process of building out your ship is surprisingly unrestrictive. Forge your own corridor paths and elevators to create multiple floors. This straightforward but open ended approach to the ship building should be applauded, it works well.

Genesis Alpha One Video Review Screen 4

Each room provides a key purpose – the Greenhouse allows you to house various plants, making the ship’s atmosphere suitable for your varying on-board lifeforms. The Tractor Beam lets you collect resources from space debris. The Hanger allows you to send a shuttle down to planets to gather resources and discover artefacts. The Refinery lets you refine the ore you collect from those planets into usable materials. There’s a whole bunch of rooms on offer here, each with a unique purpose that compliments other areas of the ship.

In first person you can explore and interact with your ship as you choose. Exploring your creation is admittedly pretty satisfying. Interacting with the terminals in each room however isn’t so much – outside of managing staff, each one basically boils down to holding a single button whilst a bar fills the screen to complete the activity. Whether it’s beaming up debris, scanning planets, cloning new crew members or crafting weapons – it’s all a single button press.

Thankfully however you can assign members of the crew to do said busy-work for you. Each crew member can be assigned to a room to carry out the activity automatically, such as scanning planets nearby or refining ore into usable materials. Your ship’s bots automatically transfer materials to the appropriate locations, such as unloading your shuttle into deposit storage, or bringing heaps of ore to the refinery for your crew members to work on it. It gives the game’s ship management side of things an almost RTS vibe, something which I really enjoyed.

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The game’s multiple systems at play on your ship work surprisingly well together. Robots and crew members just crack on with their jobs without much intervention. It brings back some fond memories of the bygone PC gaming era when developers were trying to build real time strategy games with first person elements, such as C&C Renegade or Savage: The Battle for Newerth. Those games hold a special place in my nostalgic heart.

Unfortunately though the game almost falls apart when it comes to the mechanical side of actually playing it. Whilst the ship management side of things works well, the first person combat certainly does not. Aiming and movement feels completely floaty and weightless. Shooting is unsatisfying, no matter which weapon you use – whether it’s a shotgun, machine gun or laser rifle, all of them are well and truly lacking in any kind of punch.

Moving from side to side to avoid projectiles or even just kiting basic enemies feels all too simple, whilst you hold a single button to lock on and shoot. There’s just no real depth here, no capacity for skill. There’s no real recoil to manage or feeling of impact. It just doesn’t feel even remotely good in a world where solid feeling FPS combat has become the norm.

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It’s an area of the game which should feel great. Fighting aliens on unknown planets, or battling to defend your ship from invaders, these should be memorable highlights. Instead they’re dull and often frustrating thanks to an absolutely gross flinch when your character has been hit.

Exploring those planets is a huge disappointment too. It became quickly apparent that every planet you visit involves the exact same loop. Your ship parks in the centre of a small circular area you can walk around. Whether it’s filled with plants, dust or rocks, there’s very little to see on each planet. They’re all mostly flat small areas (granted some have ever so slight declines) with alternate window dressing. There’s no hills to roam or civilisations to uncover. Just a circle area with a green boundary, containing some rocks to mine (again by holding a single button and waiting for a bar to fill), whilst enemies occasionally spawn and head towards you.

Even the planets which contain discoveries, amount to nothing more than finding a point and standing next to it until the scanning reaches 100%, allowing you to collect the item. These collectable items are locations of alien / plant life, suit upgrades, or new weapons. Sadly, there’s just no sense of exploration here whatsoever. Whilst it’s clear the planets are randomly generated, there’s far too little variety.

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Graphically the game has a clean 70’s sci-fi visual style. It looks sharp and runs at 60fps on the enhanced consoles, which is nice. That retro aesthetic though often swings a little too far into the realm of feeling fairly cheap and low-budget rather than unique.

The roguelike elements come upon death. As you explore the randomly generated solar system the further out from the centre you go the more chance of danger there is. Whether its tougher enemies on the planets themselves, or roaming bands of aliens which actually teleport directly onto your ship and cause absolute havoc. They just keep coming!

Once you die you’re quickly transported into the shoes of another clone from your ship’s crew. Don’t worry though, those crew are replaceable. You can create a clone of a species of your choice, embedding any alien abilities / bonuses you’ve uncovered and researched. It’s a neat idea that works well.

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If all your crew perish, it’s game over. Any artefacts you uncovered on your way can be selected on your future playthroughs, and slowly but surely you’ll unlock more corporations and species of crew to start with to spice things up somewhat.

Sadly however, Genesis Alpha One doesn’t provide a satisfying enough gameplay loop to really keep you wanting to come back for more playthroughs. Each playthrough can take hours of often slow progress, farming resources and building up your basic facilities to reach the more challenging later game aspects. Sure there’s other species to uncover, but outside of some statistical benefits they’re mostly not all that different. And sure, there’s more weapons to research and build…but again, the combat feels so feeble that none of them are enjoyable to use.

There’s some really cool ideas at play here. The base building side of the game works great, it’s straight forward, simple to use, and fun to experiment with. But many other core pillars of the game have unfortunate major issues – the combat is poor and space exploration is lacking.

Genesis Alpha One Video Review Screen 1

Co-op would have been a brilliant addition to alleviate some of the more dull elements of the game. It makes a whole lot of sense too, with your crew being filled with drone-like clones. Defending a ship with a friend might have made things a little more exciting and carrying out the ship’s busy-work would feel like less of a chore. No, it wouldn’t solve the game’s mechanical issues but it would certainly have made the experience more enjoyable. Alas, the game is currently a purely singleplayer experience.

Genesis Alpha One still offers alot to like. There’s glimpses of something surprisingly unique and genuinely interesting under the weak combat and often repetitive gameplay loop. The game is priced cheaper than most, and many folks won’t struggle to get their money’s worth. As a base it feels like a title that could evolve into something great given enough time and resources with future updates. As it stands though it’s hard to recommend the game wholeheartedly right now.

REVIEW OVERVIEW
Overall Score
VIAGame provided by publisher for review
Charles is the editor of Gaming LYF. Self proclaimed industry news addict, currently researching ways to feed Twitter, Reddit and other news sources straight into his veins.
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