093REVIEW
INFO
FORMATPS4
ETAOUT NOW
PUBTEAM17
DEVRADIATION BLUE
GENESIS ALPHA ONE
Boldly going where lots of games have gone before
P
iloting 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 findinga 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 brand-
new galaxy to explore.
There are plenty of delicious
moments in Genesis AlphaOne: 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.SPACE JAMMED @alexjayspencer
VERDICTThere’s no ‘we come
in peace’ option in this
shoot-first-ask-questions-
never universe.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“IT’S A CREW MANAGEMENT
GAME, IT’S A SHIP BUILDER,
IT’S A PLANET EXPLORER.”