Genesis Alpha One Deluxe Edition

If you have patience, imagination and the ability to integrate anadressed core bugs in your gameplay then Genesis Alpha One is quite rewardable. It really feels like you're a corporation director in an unreleased Ridley Scott movie.

I can't believe I have been sleeping on this for two years. An amazing game that reminds you of several other pretty good titles but has them sort of strung together. From the randomly generated galaxy you explore - a little reminiscent of a smaller No Man's Sky - through the planet surface resource gathering - a little like a simpler version of Deep Rock Galactic - to the ship design and crew management and, obviously, all out combat in all of these areas. The whole thing seems mighty confusing when you watch a video of it, but if you take it at your own pace it all blends together very well indeed. The execution is very solid and while some people complain about there being bugs, all bugs I found have been rather minor (like once in a while a sound file keeps playing when it shouldn't). What makes Genesis Alpha One special, though, is not the blend of various other ideas, but the original ideas it incorporates: there is perma-death in the game, but as long as you have crew left, someone else can step up as captain, keeping you right in the fun. Also I really love the immersive controls of the various console screens keeping you in the game world, letting you look around while you use them. Thirdly I'd like to praise the game's story which may not be overly exciting but its told nicely in the shape of video logs that can be found in wreckage (a budget-minded choice I figure, but it is done well here). Overall if you enjoy sci-fi shooters and space exploration, I would recommend giving this game a good look.

Alpha One has a lot of really good game play once you get the idea of what you can do, but its all just a taste of what could have been much deeper. You hunt aliens and clear infestations off your ship by crawling around dark work shafts, Missions to mine on planets, Tower defense your ship from pirates. Unfortunately it's like a early access game that the devs needed to put a few more months into to finished the content to completion. It played stable and I found I wanted much more of the game when I hit a ending. Just like a really good demo. Worth a good sale but not anything near full price justified.

Ok - so the tutorial was a bit clunky. There was definitely a learning curve - but I sorta enjoyed that. (To the publisher, you might make the tutorial a bit more user friendly). HOWEVER, if you like using your brain, thinking things through, figuring things out, this game is awesome. The UI is very immersive. In fact, you'll find it hard to find a game more immersive in functionality than this little gem. Think Sim City meets Dead Space. You have to build your ship, craft your ship, search out components, fight aliens. It's like an all-in-one space-fighter-crafter-open_world_exploration bonanza. The graphics are good, the immersion is tangible, you have to have a head on your shoulders to think design through (like Sim City). The crafting is intelligent and complex, and the pure immersion, REAL immersion, is nice. Totally worth the buy. May I recommend that you check your map often. You'll be grateful you did. This is a good game.

Genesis Alpha One is the kind of game that you can sink countless hours in or just play it on a dime. It's the kind of game that can randomly punish you closely from the start or feel boring for hours. As a space-oriented Roguelike, it's right in that genre. I would personally give it a 4/5, but I got to be honest and point out that the game is more of an half-empty-cup of a game than an half-full-cup. The game is rough around its edges when it comes to preparation, which is also RNG-based, and feel, on some runs, as a waste of time because there was simply no good solution. The game "gameplay" is divided by "runs" that can last from barely 30 minutes to 30-40 hours depending on what you do, what you face and what you get. The game is mechanically and constantly introducing more hardship as you "move forward" regardless of how well prepared you may be and preparation is 95% based on luck/RNG and 5% based on whenever you decide to do an activity in your sector or not. You might have found blueprint for a high grade medical station and yet not be at the point in the game where you can even just get the resource to craft it and then find yourself against armed alien creatures invading your ship with nothing to even fight back, unless you could smack them with that captain tablet of yours that controls the ship. This is in conjunction with how the AI in this game is not autonomous when it comes to your crew, but it's more than efficient when it's on the opposite side. You can see your crew as an extension of yourself (or tools). You set them on a patrol or on a station (a module) in your ship to make sure you don't have to manually manage those and the AI is always doing a poor job at it. The AI will only target hostile living things and never do any "cleaning" nor fixing. You might have 5 nests in your ship that keep spawning critters every 10-15 secs and the AI will only hunt and attack the critters while you have to crawl around, cleaning the nests.