GENESIS ALPHA ONE
Boldly going where lots of games have gone before
Piloting a spaceship through the stars is one of those fantasies that has been brilliantly realised in a ton of games. Whichever bit of the fantasy appeals to you most, there’s probably a game for it. The camaraderie of a crew pulling together? Try the cute-but-deadly Lovers In A Dangerous Spacetime or the VR fantasy of Star Trek: Bridge Crew. Tinkering with an engine that can take man to the stars? Kerbal Space Program. Exploring the final frontier? No Man’s Sky. And now there’s Genesis Alpha One, which attempts to fulfil all of these fantasies at once. It’s a crew management game, it’s a ship builder, it’s a planet explorer. There’s more than a touch of the Nostromo about your ship’s industrial corridors and the clunky ’70s computer interface you use to control its various operations. Touching down on the surface of an alien world and emerging into the dusty atmosphere, it’s almost a surprise you don’t come across any big xenomorph-spawning eggs – though there are plenty of alien creepy-crawlies to shoot.
You play the captain of a spaceship that has left the ravaged Earth behind in hope of finding a new home. The game unites all its various modes through a single pool of resources. Adding modules to your ship uses resources. Gathering more requires planetary expeditions or manning an onboard tractor beam to strip space wreckage. If you don’t fancy doing these tasks yourself, you can assign your crew to carry them out, and (provided you’ve built the right module) clone the crew to staff the ship more efficiently.
CAPTAIN COOK
To jump metaphors for a moment: it’s an ambitious recipe, the kind you cook when trying to clear out the fridge. There are a lot of great ingredients – we haven’t even mentioned the roguelike permadeath system, where each crew member doubles as an extra life, getting a speedy promotion whenever the ship’s current captain dies, but run out and you’ll be dumped right back at the start, with a brandnew galaxy to explore.
There are plenty of delicious moments in Genesis Alpha One: crawling through an access tunnel to repair an energy node that’s been nibbled on by an alien crab; the ten-second countdown as you retreat from a planet, enemy fire streaking past as you desperately wish for the ship doors to close; or finding an astronaut’s final transmission at a crash site, pointing you in the direction of an unlockable item on the far side of the galaxy.
The important question, though, is whether these great tastes actually taste great together. The game slides between all its elements fairly seamlessly, but it doesn’t quite communicate how they fit together into a larger whole. Genesis Alpha One does a good job of borrowing from familiar fantasies, but it never really manages to create its own.
VERDICT
“IT’S A CREW MANAGEMENT GAME, IT’S A SHIP BUILDER, IT’S A PLANET EXPLORER.”
An interesting mash-up of ideas from various space exploration games, from ship building to alien battling, in a single spacefaring package that never quite gels. Alex Spencer