Genesis Alpha One Deluxe Edition

Is the game still in alpha? I can't tell. Maybe it's beta? That would be disappointing because a feature freeze would mean no further design changes and the game could really benefit from some. # Why it could use more lite and less rogue? Let me put it this way: You board a ship, clear most of it and loot the ammo racks. You save/exit and come back to it the next day. All enemies re-spawn but ammo racks are now empty. And you never got around to scouring the ship for modules or sites yet. Ya' screwed buddy. Doesn't help that often you spawn into the bridge surrounded by ~12 enemies that instantly mow you down resulting in insta-death. The game won't change the spawn point for the next captain either. Ideally fully scanning the ship should be rewarded by ability to pick a safer spawn point on the ship or just the room being cleared. Speaking of raids... should a pirate ship target you even if you fight them off and their captain messages you with a 'GG - I'm out of here', the raid won't stop. It'll keep going seemingly indefinitely. I presume it would end after some number of waves but I was unlucky enough to have another pirate raid come up from yet another faction back to back so I couldn't really tell if the first just stopped because of the second. Either the ship assault should retain the state when you save/exit(preferable) or it should completely reset the loot and all. # Now a little about the ship/base building. 1: You can't assign a deposit to clearing so if you want to relocate it destroying it also destroys the resources in there 2: ideally neighboring cells of same type should merge so that you need less corridor. The space and energy waste is real bad ... Finally character controller could use some work. Example. A mistake of not normalizing movement vector so strafing and moving forward/back add up to diagonal movement achieving ridiculous speed. And walk speed is too high, almost same as running. Would add much more but reached text limit.

This is one of the most atmospheric games I've ever played. It's like a cross between FTL and Doom and manages to be fun without being scary despite the setting. The shooting and corridors are a lot of fun, especially when you board an enemy ship and have to clear the place out while being attacked from all sides. The weapons are all a lot of fun and the unlocks, finding suit artefacts and things are generally pretty fun. Unfortunately, the reviews are generally accurate. It is pretty grindy and a lot of the unlocks are basically "grind a lot so you can start with more artefacts so you can grind slightly less on your next run". That said - there simply isn't anything that manages to merge genres like this, and I've really enjoyed my time with it (completed one run and just about to complete my second). I really hope they can take what they've done here and build on it in a sequel. Bravo.

This game will keep you up all night with just one more mission, just one more upgrade, just one more system to explore... First off, I know its not for everyone. The graphics are good, but not great, the combat is decent, but not fancy. The music is moody and good, but there is not a lot of it. The game is a MAJOR time sink. However, everything it does comes together as more then the sum of its parts. The atmosphere is excellent, the mood is perfect, the strategy starts slow but soon your juggling all kinds of things and scrapping together how to move forward. There isn't really much story or conversion, but you can sit at your computer and use your imaginiation are really ROLE PLAY this game to life. Building the ship is awesome, and to make it work takes planning. Everything has this mid tech sci-fi look thats gritty and functional. It all looks like something from Alien or 2001. It feels like a great Sci Fi novel, they you just sort of imagine as you play. The gameplay loop feels like a much more complicated FTL, in first person. You actually DO everything. IF you like rogue likes... and IF you love hard Sci Fi, and IF you want a game that you can spend hours and hours at in one play sitting, I can whole heartedly recommend this game.

Genesis: Alpha One is an ankle-deep roguelike sandbox -- entertaining for ten or twenty minutes, or for the obsessive achievement hunter/starship designer, but not substantial enough for more than a few hours. The roguelike elements are fun, but the game itself can be tedious: build a new module, run to the tractor beam pod to gather more salvage, then build a new module. Rinse and repeat. Occasionally, you travel to the surface of a planet (either alone or with an AI-driven companion -- there's no multiplayer option),and there you'll contend with alien baddies of various types while collecting resources. However, the resources are found in roughly the same quantity in space and on planets, so there's not a lot of variety. What variety there is lies in the crash sites: small planet-side shipwrecks, alien structures and broken equipment that grant new weapons, log entries to advance the story, and occasionally have ammo scattered around them. All with a camera that honestly feels like a low-friction skateboard. Which brings me to the biggest near-miss the game suffers: the difficulty. It can swing from mindlessly easy to aggravatingly hard, with little warning. One slip -- move too slowly between modules, or miss an alien infestation or ship incursion -- can undo hours of work. In the end, Genesis: Alpha One is a flawed gem. The game has enough content to be fun, until you figure out what everything does, and then it becomes a chore, especially when you start a new game and have to re-deploy and/or re-research all the modules you found on your last run. If that's your thing, this game will keep you going until something more polished comes along, but if you're easily bored, this will go back on your 'play-it-once-in-a-while' shelf fairly quickly. I rated it three stars because it *is* a fun game, but it could have used a bit of pre-release polishing to find out just what that means.

This is just a really bad game. Beyond just the boring loop you'll be going on this game seems to be broken in some pretty fundamental ways. For instance, after loading into my game I walked into a corridor just be blown into space. Were aliens attacking my ship while the game isn't running? The game is garish and loud to boot, I felt like an autistic child at a metal concert when this thing first loaded. Boring shooting, boring enemies, loud abrasive sound and music, ugly graphics and buggy to boot. Just awful.