Genesis Alpha One

PC, PS4, Xbox One

Much like the spaceships it has you constructing and customising, Genesis Alpha One feels like an assemblage of disparate parts, pulled together into a slightly rickety whole. The parts themselves are all perfectly functional, but as with any game that wraps up multiple components, what really matters is whether, when brought together, they manage to create something more than their sum.

Let’s start, as each playthrough of Genesis Alpha One does, with the ship building. You’re assigned a set amount of resources in order to build a checklist of mandatory facilities – quarters for your crew; a greenhouse to generate their air supply; a tractor beam for extracting debris from nearby wrecks – and then left to decide how to arrange them. Each module snaps neatly onto the skeleton of your ship, and can be linked up with corridors, lifts and access tunnels.

Once you’ve got a workable ship, the game proper starts, shifting you into more of a management role. How will you replenish your pool of resources, and what will you spend them on? Over time, you can grow your crew – literally; they’re all clones – and build new modules, taking your ship from a compact Millennium Falcon to a full-blown USS Enterprise, with facilities spread across multiple storeys. It’s a city-builder in miniature, all about balancing input versus output, but with a fairly major difference. Once you leave the topdown construction screen, the game all takes place in realtime, from a firstperson perspective, with each module operated manually. Think FTL as an FPS, or a Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime where you have to manage all the adorable astronauts yourself.

You’re put in the role of captain, assigning crew members to tasks or getting stuck in yourself, through the medium of standing at a terminal and holding down a button while a loading bar fills. These are not the most thrilling interactions, but they do ground the abstractions of resource-gathering in something tangible. Every task comes with a risk. Each chunk of iron beamed on board, every piece of ore refined, has a chance of bringing a hostile lifeform on board. Because yes, there’s a shooter component to Genesis Alpha One. You’re tasked with fighting back infestations of bugs and, later, boardings by more capable and better-armed humanoid foes. The latter are more satisfying to fight than the infestations, which largely involve looking at your feet and squinting as you try to discern where you should be shooting. This is bolstered by a light towerdefence element, as you identify likely hot zones and blind spots around the ship, then deploy turrets and barriers to repel invaders. There’s solid motivation to do this – left unchecked, they’ll destroy the nodes that power each module, eventually tearing your ship apart.

Not all fights take place within the confines of your own ship, however. Construction of the hangar module opens up nearby planets for exploration – small patches of land with a procedurally generated set of resources to be collected, crash sites to be raided, and local fauna to avoid getting killed by. It’s like No Man’s Sky, if each of its worlds were cordoned off to a 100 square-metre area. This is another task that can be completed by your clone minions – just assign one or two to the hangar, pick a destination and wave them off – but the expeditions are a welcome break from the constant claustrophobia of metal hallways and crawlspaces. Eventually, an expedition will go awry, or an ill-advised wander into the wrong corner of space will bring those space pirates to your unprepared door, and you’ll die. And it’s here that Genesis Alpha One introduces the final module strapped onto its already heaving frame. Surprise! It’s also a Roguelike. Death isn’t necessarily final – at least not the first time – because the captain’s hat is merely passed along to the next available clone. But eat through all your crew members before you can manage to clone up some fresh ones, and it’s right back to the beginning of a new journey in a regenerated galaxy.

The problem with this structure, as Genesis Alpha One deploys it, is that the differences between each of these galaxies take a long while to become apparent. The first hour or so of any given playthrough is essentially identical: complete the checklist of modules, collect the basic resources to build the rest, and then slowly push from star system to star system in search of adventure. This is somewhat alleviated by unlocking some of the higher-level corporations, which can be selected as your faction at the outset of each playthrough to alter the starting conditions, but it’s an eventual solution to an imminent problem.

The unlocks, which also include different species to man your ship and performance-enhancing artefacts, aren’t quite enough to pull you through the game. Nor is the game’s stated end goal: to find a planet that your crew could call home, that meets the requirements for moving in – which may require them to undergo some genetic alterations, like terraforming in reverse – in order to settle there. A noble cause, sure, but you rarely feel it in the actual process of collecting resources, blasting aliens and upgrading your ship.

For all the myriad parts that make up Genesis Alpha One, it feels like there’s something missing at the centre. Without a clear motivating engine to drive your actions, it can feel like you’re constantly playing just the top layer – that strategy wrapper of base-building, resource management and upgrade trees you might expect in an XCOM or Total War – without ever getting to play the actual game bit buried underneath. Chances are you’ll abandon ship long before you break through the crust.

Without a clear motivating engine to drive your actions, it can feel like you’re playing just the top layer