It’s easy to see that a great deal of effort has been put into Genesis Rising, a new real-time strategy game set in space from developer Metamorf. And it‘s not just from a gameplay perspective, but also in the backstory. There are several pages dedicated towards learning more about the various factions, their history, unit types, major characters, and other underlying details. It’s a nice change of pace from the usual: “You have a bunch of space ships and there are these aliens who don’t like you” routine. Still, despite the cool universe in which you are dropped into, the game fails to deliver in a few key areas, which in the end hamstrings it into “also-ran” status.
The storyline focuses on humanity’s war-ridden past, where shortly after their initial expansion into deep space, a bunch of alien races decided to have a big party (i.e. planetary bombardment) over at Earth; after being pushed to the point of near-extinction by this assault, a so-called “Savior” arose and united the tattered remains of the human race together into a fighting force.
Eventually the Savior met his end at the hands of the aliens, but this simply turned him into a martyr, who then sufficiently inspired the remaining humans to not only drive off the aliens, but begin their own crazed crusade to conquer the entire universe, with the Savior at the focal point of their religion. The problem is that they’re doing a damn good job of it too, and the other races have been subjugated to the point where they’re beginning to rally together to try and put a stop to the human threat.
Given this setup for the single player campaign, it’s easy to fit the humans in as the ‘bad guys’, which is an interesting twist. Nevertheless, the player assumes the role of Iconah, who is a leading Captain in the human empire’s fleet. This fleet consists of ships called “Organids”, which are a near-perfect fusion between organic and technological material. The ability to mutate these ships at will provides a great deal of tactical flexibility, enabling the human warships to overcome just about any kind of situation, and Iconah happens to command one of the most powerful Organid ships available.
Genesis Rising provides a campaign consisting of over 30 ‘branching’ missions – which means each time you finish a level you bring up the Starmap screen to choose which sector you want to jump to next. Each mission is interconnected in that the fleet you’ve built up comes with you over to the next level, so harvesting as much possible before moving on is critical. On that note, “Blood” serves as the game’s central resource, and is available only in limited quantities from either your central space station (if one is available), or the rotting carcasses of enemy ships. And ultimately, this is what the game boils down to: Keeping a constant supply of blood on hand, harvesting it wherever possible, and expanding your collection of “genes” through either trade, or combat.
In fact, the gene system makes up the crux of the gameplay. All organic ships have a number of slots where genes can be mounted, and choosing the right genes for the job is the crucial key to victory. During the campaign, you’re only given a few basic combat and booster genes to start with, but with more and more enemy encounters (or opportunities for trade), your collection expands.
While in many cases it’s easy to get a new gene type simply by harvesting from a destroyed enemy ship, in many cases genes are randomly destroyed along with the host vessel, meaning capturing them using the “Invasion” gene can often be a bit more practical. But there’s a downside to this too, which lies in the game’s surprisingly aggressive unit capacity limits. You are usually fighting to keep a fleet of four or five combat vessels active in your fleet, at a maximum – and this is on top of your existing support ships. Thus, the battles are not huge in scale.
