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Genesis Rising might go down in history as the goriest outer space real-time strategy game ever. Sure it’s set in space, but that doesn’t stop your ships from exploding into huge chunks of blood and guts when the battle goes awry. Yeah, Genesis Rising is a little different.

Captain Blood

Of course, different doesn’t always make for a better game. In this case, playing Genesis Rising is hit or miss. The basic gameplay is surprisingly easy to understand despite the odd-ball nature of your units. Most of the ships found in the game are biological.  They are living things that feed on the one resource in the game… blood. 

Resource harvesting can normally be accomplished from these organic space stations that act as giant blood banks. A surplus of blood allows the player to build more ships, but it also acts as a means of repairing damaged vessels. This feature shows off one of the more interesting strategies in the game. After a battle, the carcasses of your defeated foes can be used to replenish your blood supply. This encourages more aggressive tactics.

Gene Therapy

But the real kick for players will be how ships are built. Players can generate ships of several different sizes, but the abilities of each ship are up to you and your gene pool. Genesis Rising sports over 50 different abilities you can bestow on your ships. You can arm your ship with projectile bullets, swarm missiles, torpedoes, and lots of shield to create a slow but powerful juggernaut. Or you could add a bunch of speed boosters to your invader ship in the hopes that it’ll overwhelm your opponent before they can get too many shots in.

Most abilities have counters as well. Your fighter armed with bullets might encounter an enemy that has shields against projectiles. So in an interesting twist, you can change up your ships genetic make-up on the fly. Just swap out your bullet genes for beam weapon genes and you’re good to go. Or maybe you could supplement your bullets with a shield jammer. The downside of this is that you need to enter a different game screen to do it, and swapping our genes takes time. And, of course, each ship has a limit on the number of genes that it can have at one time.

Fire and Forget

It’s quite a bit to juggle at first and the game doesn’t always make it easy for you. Basic navigation and combat commands work just fine. And there’s a helpful unit bar on the side of the screen where you can track the status of your fleet. But when it comes down to actually engaging in combat, things get a little hairy. The usual methods of moving about the battlefield don’t work well.  Because the game is played on a huge scale, scrolling around takes too long. There’s a mini-map, but it’s functionally useless.  That leaves the quick bar on the side of the screen as the only useful means of moving around.

Nuanced combat can also be a problem because the player is required to manually target and fire off special weapons. Finding a tiny enemy ship amid a bunch of giant ones is too much trouble.  But there’s still something compelling about the combat in Genesis Rising. It definitely takes a lot more micro-management than your average RTS, but you’re generally working with fewer units. It’s quirky, but given enough time, it all starts to sink in.

Parlez-vous Story Suckitude?

One thing that will never sink in is the god-awful storyline.  Genesis Rising is apparently based on some kind of comic book. And even if you were to look past the horrible “Christ myth reborn” hooey in the hopes of enjoying the crap dialogue and voice acting in all of its cheesy goodness, you won’t really be able to. Everything is presented in such a disjointed manner that it’s pretty much pointless to even try to care about what’s going on.

The game offers a branching campaign where you get to choose between missions and even influence events within missions based on whether you respond “positively” or “negatively” to in-game conversations. Sadly it doesn’t come together because the dialogue (or the English translation of the dialogue) leads to characters saying the most off-the-wall things to one another.

Genes in SPAAAAACE!!

Genesis Rising isn’t for everyone. Heck, I’m not even sure it’s a good match for most RTS fans. There are more than a few problems with the game. But there are some really nice ideas suspended down there beneath the crusty surface. If you manage to tough it out, there’s a good game here. But if you’re not willing to put up with the quirks and some design issues, consider getting your RTS fix elsewhere.

Article by: Greg Bemis
Video produced by: Paul Bonanno