Dreamcatcher brings us the world's first real time strategy game featuring tiiiiiiiicks in spaaaaaace.
Genesis Rising is one of those ideas crazy enough that it just...might...work. You're in charge of a spaceship that's also a gooey biological organism. It sucks blood from, well, blood stations and then hatches new ships from its belly. Before sending these newborns into battle, you install weapons and powers onto them. It's certainly a unique idea, and the developers got the "crazy" right. Unfortunately, they can't quite pull off the "just...might...work" part.
The setting is outer space, but on a 2D plane. There's a restrictive unit limit, so you don't control many ships; this isn't a drag-select RTS where you throw swarms of units into battle. Instead, the fleets are small and every fighter is precious. You keep your ships healed after battle by sucking blood from enemy carcasses. This is also an important way to steal new powers, which are called "genes".
A gene is basically a weapon or special ability that determines a ship's role. Is it a stealth ship with long range weapons? Is it a buff to add armor to local friendlies? Is it shielded from short range projectile weapons, or does it have extra armor to protect it to a lesser degree from all weapons? Does it have extra speed, storage capacity, or maneuverability? It all depends on which genes you install. You can get new genes by sucking them from defeated enemy ships, or by purchasing them from the neutral traders on the map.
One of the best things about Genesis Rising is the clever mix-and-match implications of this gene system. Because enemy genes are always visible, there's a meta-game of trumps and countertrumps. The ships are frankly little more than vessels for the genes. This supposedly gives Genesis Rising the flexibility of a collectible card game.
But it all falls apart because the pacing and interface simply don't hold up. There's a handy fleet management interface along the right side of the screen, but it doesn't help with positioning ships. Neither does the minimap, which consists of a few dim inscrutable dots. The only game speed is a fast clip, and the unit control is very loosey-goosey. Ships loop around and steer ponderously and stray where you don't want them. There's no way to arrange your fleet or set unit facing. Yet, believe it or not, part of the gameplay involves manually controlling ships to avoid incoming missiles.
The gene micromanagement is even more demanding. You have to duck into a separate screen to place genes, which involves futzing around with indistinct pictures of ships and little icon tiles for genes. A ship with installed genes has a higher hit point capacity, but you have to manually heal it to capacity to take advantage of this. And when you swap genes out, you lose this capacity. This presumably discourages on-the-fly gene re-jiggering, but in practice, it just makes taking advantage of new genes a serious hassle. It also makes the gameplay feel like a refueling sim, albeit a grotesque blood-themed refueling sim.
Many genes have to be triggered manually, and even aimed. In a less fiddly RTS, this would work. But here, it's yet another thing you have to do while the game is running away from you. It's not easy to see which genes are installed on which ships, and there's no way to get a tooltip to tell what the icons are for enemy genes. A simple pause button would have gone a long way towards saving this game from its own depth. Genesis Rising bills itself as an "action RTS", but in this case, the phrase seems to be shorthand for "an RTS buried under its own busywork".
To their credit, the artists at Serbian developer Metamorf have created a universe with a genuinely creepy setting. Imagine the aliens from Prey, but instead of playing from inside their space station, you're controlling their ships. The units are ugly, wet, and wicked looking. You get slimy space whales as conceived by H.R. Geiger, part crabs, part prickly beetles, part squishy bugs. The graphics engine does a marvelous job of presenting icky creature ships and gouts of blood in space.
The single player campaign is a story where you jump your persistent fleet around among different maps, gathering ship designs and genes. There are some ridiculously cheesy cutscenes in which your plastic character (you can only do so much with the "wet" look) talks to various plastic aliens. Branching dialogue offers you a choice of poorly localized blue (good) answers or red (evil) answers. The storyline shifts accordingly. There's an interesting menageries of alien races and powers here, such as creatures who carve their ships from asteroids, ice-themed aliens, and even some standard issue human military ships, looking slightly out of place in this odd gooey universe.
The multiplayer games have some promise, but they're built around farming respawning neutral units. So rather than playing against the other player, you play against the computer for a while. When you're powerful enough, you jump the other player. He who jumps first jumps best. And micromanagement skills trump all else.
It's a shame that Metamorf couldn't come up with a better interface, or at least some way to slow down the pace of the action when it gets frantic. They have some great ideas and their universe has a distinct and visually arresting look. The gene-stealing and blood-drinking theme makes for an interesting concept with great gameplay implications. But the bottom line is that as a game, Genesis Rising sucks, both literally and figuratively.
Genesis Rising flirts with greatness, but interface issues and poor pacing make it an also-ran.
It's a story we've heard a hundred times. Genesis Rising has a lot of cool and novel ideas, but inevitably falls flat due to of a lack of common sense. It is the antithesis of a game like the recently released space strategy epic Galactic Civilizations II and its Dark Avatar expansion. Whereas that game let you can tweak every feature (or even turn some off if you didn't like them), Genesis Rising is a real-time space strategy game that doesn't allow you to adjust anything at all: there are no difficulty levels, you can't pause and issue orders when you need to, and you can't even save a game in the middle of a mission. You're playing the developer's game and you're going to play it the way they want you to play it.
Genesis Rising takes place some 3,000 years in the future. The human race has pretty much conquered the known universe sans one last remaining galaxy. You're a commander leading the human army into this last galaxy, searching for an item called the Universal Heart. This hunt is the backdrop for the game's branching campaign that allows you to pick and choose your missions to a certain extent -- you even get to keep your units from one mission to the next. There's a lengthy (if a bit confusing) back-story to the campaign, but it's not important. What is important is that your ships are basically living organisms that look a lot like something ripped out of an H.R. Giger painting or perhaps a Warhammer 40K Tyranid army book.
There is a rhyme and a reason to this. Your ships, being "alive," can "suck" the genes from other ships, thereby making it their own and even morph on the fly as they acquire new abilities. In fact, it's the genes that make the game tick; in a traditional sense, they work as unit upgrades. One gene provides a ship with a long-range rocket while another gene may grant a ship a force field. There are a slew of various genes in the game and you're free to mix and match them as you see fit, even stacking the same one in order to make it more potent. This is actually one of the best parts of Genesis Rising, as outfitting your various ships with these abilities allows you to use ships in certain roles. One small fighter might be heavily armored while another might have extra speed with small short-range lasers. It's entirely up to you as to how you deck out your fleet and nothing is set in stone. You can change the gene setup on a ship as long as you have the necessary amount of blood.
If all of this gene-sucking and living-ship stuff sounds sort of gross, well, it is. In fact, the game's primary resource is blood. You need it to do everything from healing ships, using acquired genes, to even constructing new ships from scratch. It's all about the blood. You even get a slimy slurping noise when one of your ships sucks the blood out of a defeated enemy vessel, and when a large ship is destroyed you are treated to a huge explosion in which the screen runs red.
Even without the graphic display of space blood, Genesis Rising relies heavily on its visuals. This is a very pretty game full of color and excellent explosions and weapon effects. You can zoom in and out as needed and the ship detail is outstanding. The heavy dose of blood just adds to the striking visuals.
The problem is that a lot of these cool ideas are nullified because of poor implementation and a severe lack of flexibility. First, there's the game's pacing. It's fast. Once things get hot and heavy it can be extremely difficult to manage everything. There are too many things that require manual activation. For example, if an enemy ship fires a missile you must manually dodge it. This is next to impossible when you have your entire fleet engaged with a lot of enemies. Is no one piloting that light fighter? Do I really need to tell the pilot, "Um, you might want to use evasive action right about now..."
Although the game is played in space, you move on a 2D plane. The camera allows full rotation but there's no depth involved: You can't move below or above another ship. While that may seem weird considering the setting, it's could be a blessing in disguise, as it's hard enough to manually issue move commands in the heat of battle. Adding an extra axis to the mix might just make your head explode.
Some of the gene-weapons are used automatically, but many aren't, such as the force field or long-range missile. It's hard enough getting your ships where you need them to be during a fight but to also worry about everything else is just a pain. This is another example of not allowing players to play the way they feel most comfortable. If you can manage all of this stuff, that's fine, but others would like to be able to automate some of it or at least slow the pace down or pause the game while issuing several orders. Sadly, this simply isn't an option. There's also no option to save your game mid-mission; it only saves after you complete a map. Some of the scenarios are quite long, involving multiple stages, and the fact that you can't save when you want just makes no sense whatsoever. It causes repetitiveness and boredom when you have to do the first bit over and over again just because the second half of the mission kicks your tail.
Multiplayer and skirmish games are fun and a nice break from the campaign missions which are more than a bit scripted and puzzle-oriented, but they still suffer from many of the same pacing issues. Playing against a buddy cannot save the game from its own design flaws.
Genesis Rising is by no means a total loss and there's certainly some fun to be had, but its lofty potential is squandered due to some poor decisions and a rigid design that will only appeal to a select number of players. Genesis Rising is a pretty, bloody, missed opportunity.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Good ideas need good execution to make a good game.
Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade got caught in a trap of its own making. While many of the ideas are creative and lend some interesting gameplay ideas to a space-based strategy setting where humans use blood-filled biological ships, there are a lot of simple issues and inconsistencies with interface, story and gameplay design.
The fiction behind Genesis Rising comes from an obscure European comic. After facing extinction, fractured human colonies united after the martyring of a unanimously respected leader. From there, the human existence turned into a long line of genetic alterations to themselves and the bionid ships they traveled in. Eventually humans reached the stars, grabbed hold, and shook out the other species on a religious crusade to dominate the universe.
The reason for the small number of units under your control is pretty apparent. Genesis Rising is all about adaptability in combat so the number of ships had to be small enough to micromanage. If you were given control of hundreds, or even just dozens, of units, it would be pretty freaking hard to sort through all of the genes, attach them to the correct ship, and use them on the fly in battle. I understand that. It just is hard to sit with that considering the resources at the disposal of the universe-wide human civilization of this fiction. I would have preferred this type of gameplay in a story with a smaller scope instead of feeling hobbled the entire way through the game. Even the first cutscene shows hundreds of ships lined up for deployment. Talk about building up false expectations. Why not at least make the main character as part of a larger invasion fleet so battles could be bigger, or at least faked to look bigger.
While the tactical action can be fairly fast-paced, this campaign can be pretty dull. While the types of missions can be varied in purpose, much of the game will see you and your fleet warping into an area with three to four enemy bases -- all with fleets -- and you'll have to take them out in order to complete your final goal. Because of the relative openness of space without more interesting terrain to develop a scenario, it's hard to get a feel that most of the missions are really much different than one another. There are some differences that will have players running errands, but travel times are long enough that it can get tedious when the payout isn't necessarily a very exciting battle.
In some cases, missions just seem to last and last and last with no end in sight. In fact, there's a mission that will keep looping forever until you get fed up and attack a different target not originally designated as a threat. I was almost sure I had encountered a bug that wouldn't let me finish the mission until I got angry enough for that myself. Not fun.
After the human campaign is over, you'll get a chance to play through some scenarios involving one of the alien races, which is nice because it's sad players aren't given more of a chance to check them out. Both the ice based and rock based aliens have different ways of producing units and different abilities that could have been exploited to better the game.
The tactical gameplay, whether in campaign or skirmish, offers up some interesting options for would be commanders. During the single player campaign, multiplayer, and skirmish, you'll will get to control the mighty bionid ships. These living organisms can be implanted with various genes that grant various abilities. They can range from basic weapons genes to booster genes that allow for speed increases or special abilities that are activated manually. Genes can be swapped out on the fly allowing for a pretty large range of tactics on the battlefield and great adaptability especially when considering the many varied genes at your disposal.
The problem is, it isn't easy enough to switch the genes out in the heat of battle to make adaptability in combat really feasible. The interface, while not horrific, is clumsy at best. Removing genes from a ship takes a certain amount of time and a new gene can only be added once a slot is empty. Micromanaging battle while trying to change micromange genes can become a nightmare. While the mechanic is still cool for some of the more puzzle-like aspects of the single player campaign, most changes are going to need to be made before battle rather than during the thick of it.
Metamorph tried to add some open-endedness to the campaign by allowing choice when it comes to both selectable missions and conversation in cutscenes. These choices provide a false sense of freedom however as you'll end up traveling everywhere and completing what amounts to a linear campaign (aside from the last mission which offers up different choices with different outcomes). The conversation strings in the odd cutscenes do allow for variation in gameplay. By choosing a peaceful or aggressive response, the characters will respond differently though most of the time the end result will be the same.
Thankfully, the game looks very good. Not all of the textures are particularly impressive and the color palettes and styles aren't as fantastically alien as we've seen in other space-based RTSs like Homeworld, but what's there is certainly good. Ships in particular look about as disgusting as you would expect a blood filled spaceship to look. One of the best aspects of the visual design is the ability for the ships to actually grow new parts when genes are added. Seeing a huge gun grow out of the top of your ship is pretty fun and awesomely gross. While the ships, weapons effects, and environments are all good, the rest of the visual presentation is suspect with bland type, boring interface windows, and a GUI that has to be one of the ugliest I've seen in some time.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved