This is even more problematic in that you cannot “capture” ships if your limit is already reached, and there appears to be no way to self-destruct a ship which is sorely needed to make room in your fleet. This is a rather serious issue given the scripting of the campaign and how small of a fleet one has to work with (and if such a feature does exist, it should definitely be made more obvious). While it features plenty of missions, here is no mid-mission save feature, only an auto-save when you jump to another zone. This forces you to replay missions over and over again until you “get it right” and is highly annoying to say the least.

Yet even in spite of this (as well as some odd mission scripting issues, like watching ships that are supposed to technically belong to the same faction – “Defiance” and “Defiance Patrol” – attacking one another), there is fun to be had just going through the process of building up your fleet, kitting out the Mothership with a terrifying array of overpowered weapons, and charging into combat; the major challenge rests in adopting to the slightly faster-paced form of combat, and mastering the obtuse interface options for quickly triggering special attacks when needed, which is easier said than done thanks to a shocking lack of hot key support.

The multiplayer in Genesis Rising is a sticking point. The game was supposed to have a “co-operative gameplay mode” where you and another player control the same fleet in a campaign setting. Sadly, Genesis Rising instead translates this as just being a multiplayer skirmish mode, where you can either play against the AI, or other players, and can (optionally) choose to control the same fleet, Starcraft-style.

Actually, this gameplay mode was pretty straightforward, and the enemy AI good enough to give you a severe beating, but there are a few stumbling blocks. Most notably is that bringing up the “trade” screen to do an exchange with another faction on the map actually forces the other player into this screen too – meaning they’re jerked away from micro-managing your forces and can’t really do anything until you’re finished. Why this was implemented is anyone’s guess, but it definitely proved to be a hindrance.

Secondly, the game is prone to either periodically pausing for long periods of time for no apparent reason, and eventually this causes either a connection error, or flat-out crash with the game. Multiplayer otherwise offers a pretty intense competitive experience, especially with the three faction types and huge gene variety – the game just badly needs a stability boost, interface overhaul, and (naturally) the addition of a true co-op mode.

Genesis Rising certainly looks the part. Seeing these crazy animated organic ship designs up close is a real pleasure, especially while they are in the process of mutation (which in many cases visibly changes the appearance of the vessel) or in the middle of a pitched battle. On a relatively high-end setup with 2GB of RAM and an X1800XL-All-In-Wonder, the framerate stayed high, and the load times were expectantly short – for the most part.

There is a surprising lack of visible damage modeling for ships. Even a ship almost on the brink of death doesn’t really look any different from one in mint condition. C’mon, Nexus: The Jupiter Incident came out a number of years ago and provided some really cool scarring effect, so is it really that hard to replicate the technology? Seeing parts of the organic ships getting blasted open by weapons fire and having them spill out blood would really have given the combat a much more dramatic edge. There’s a lot of blood when a ship blows up, there just needs to be more visual effects leading up to that.

Genesis Rising is a fair enough game that’s simply missing a few features to help carry it over the top. What it lacks in finer details and multiplayer functionality, it makes up for in backstory and dynamic, fluid, fast-paced gameplay. It’s not a classic, and it’s no Homeworld, but genre buffs could also do a lot worse.