Genesis Alpha One lands on the Epic Store today
Alien eggs? Best poke them with a stick.
Genesis Alpha One - a ship-building, space-exploring roguelike management FPS of mad ambition - is out now. One of the lesser-known exclusives snatched away from Steam for temporary Epic Store exclusivity, Radiation Blue's game of ethically questionable (final) frontier survival has been on my radar for a while. Not only are you trying to maintain and expand a colony ship as it makes its way across space, but modify the DNA of your colonists as you discover new life. See the launch trailer below.
In Genesis Alpha One, the player (it's solo only) is tasked with managing a research and exploration vessel as it searches for a new homeworld for the human race after we broke our first. You find and land on planets, mine resources, fight indigenous creatures, upgrade your ship and (ideally) capture some aliens to experiment on. The native creatures of any given planet are best suited to living there, so mashing their horrible alien faces and resistances into your human crew will make them stronger, right? It's basically a Weyland Yutani simulator, and I'm okay with that.
It's obviously not a mega-budget game, but it feels like Radiation Blue are well aware of its limitations, and lean into it in places. I especially like the ship-building UI, complete with chunky DOS terminal text and a starkly minimalist interface. Similarly, the first-person weapons look a bit stiffly animated, but they also display health and ammo on the models themselves. The roguelike aspect of the game sounds interesting, too. While losing your ship is obviously the end of the game, dying isn't, as you get to pick another crew member to possess.
While nobody in the RPS treehouse has had the chance to pick this one apart yet, a quick peek around reveals a very wide range of opinions on the game. It seems that whether the game works as a roguelike, or whether its many disparate elements work together for you is largely down to personal preference. It also suggests that the game is - whatever its flaws - interesting in its ambitions, and something I'd like to take for a spin.
Genesis Alpha One is out now on the Epic Games Store for £24.99/$29.99/€29.99. It's published by Team 17. It will apparently return to Steam on January 2020.