Genesis Alpha One Critic Reviews

Genesis Alpha One is an extremely rare beast. A confident marriage of FPS, space sim, roguelike and strategy elements, it is quite simply the first essential indie title of 2019.

Genesis Alpha One is a great indie roguelike that offers a combination of first-person shooter, ship-building and management elements.

Genesis Alpha One mixes the spirits of FTL and No Man’s Sky into a solid space simulator cocktail. Your success is dependent on your approach, with playing it safe all but guaranteeing you reach a Genesis, but a little recklessness can lead to ship invasions and desperate measure. Its unpredictable nature means you’re always on the lookout for danger and celebrate every little victory. Genesis Alpha One is recommended if you’re looking for a new challenge among the stars.

Genesis Alpha One is one of the few survival titles that blends a real sense of high-stakes urgency while also juggling several gameplay styles in the process. Even though this may seem unwieldy on paper and fraught with challenges in gameplay structure and technical aspects, Radiation Blue have managed to marry together FPS, Management sim, RTS and roguelikes into a unique and compelling experience.

It’s a satisfying mix. This is the rare (only???) game offering something for fans of Doom, No Man’s Sky, Harvest Moon, and Fortnite. It’s not the perfect simulation of life in outer space, but, in some ways, it gets closer than anything else has.

The universe of Genesis is vibrant, with distant systems lighting the ship with a beautiful sci-fi glow, and the aliens representing a full intriguing gamut from cockroach-like beasts through to humanoid aliens. This is the kind of game that people who dream of crafting their own space exploration stories, without being dragged through any particular forced narrative, will absolutely love.

From a stylistic point of view, the game got its hooks deep in me because I felt it drew visual and aural inspiration from the likes of 1980s sci-fi film legends Douglas Trumbull, John Carpenter, and Ridley Scott. Genesis: Alpha One offers a tense and methodical approach to roguelike survival through base building and resource gathering in one of the most harshest environments imaginable.

Quotation forthcoming.

An unusual game because it successfully blends together different genres. Managing your ship combined with first person shooter gameplay topped off by a randomly generated environment which can be utterly unforgiving makes for a highly original experience. The audiovisual style stands out and replayability is obviously very good. The tutorial could have been somewhat better because you'll be struggling to understand the game's mechanics when you first start out. A unique and captivating title that successfully blends different genres.

Genesis Alpha One is a fun space simulator/roguelike experience for players who enjoy resource gathering and crafting, ship management and first-person shooter mechanics – and want to play something where they’re all bundled into one package. It’s not the biggest triple AAA title on the market, but it’s definitely one of the most unique games to release and kick off 2019.

Genesis Alpha One is an ambitious triple-I game that, even though it relies too much on continuously repetitive and similar-looking activities, provides a deep, engaging and challenging experience thanks to its great visuals, some surprises along the way and gameplay mechanics that quickly become natural and intuitive.

Stick with it for more than an hour and you may well change the feeling of utter boredom to a genuine attachment for the survival or your spaceship. That is until the Framen board relentlessly your vessel and annihilate the 3-4 hour progress back to point zero.

The mix of tactical spaceship building and roguelike action is intriguing, but Genesis Alpha One suffers from a split personality and a limited development budget.

Not always fascinating.

Genesis Alpha One mixes many elements from different genres together to create a whole new experience, but even if there were no shortcomings in other sections like visuals and sound design, which there is, GAO is still not mature enough to be considered a revolutionary title it is trying to be.

Monotone missions and uninventive enemies, combined with bad AI, makes this game more of a chore than enjoyment.

Without a clear motivating engine to drive your actions, it can feel like you're constantly playing just the top layer - that strategy wrapper of base-building, resource management and upgrade trees you might expect in an XCOM or Total War - without ever getting to play the actual game bit buried underneath.

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.

The author's many interesting ideas somehow result in a completely boring and forgettable experience which exhausts itself after the first hour. Afterwards, you are trapped in a generic universe with fun in very short supply.

Gathering the necessary resources to fulfill a Genesis mission can take a lot of time, especially if you end up getting pushed back by hostile invasions. There is a base sense of joy to be had from making the numbers go up, but I never completed a Genesis mission and I doubt whatever feeling or reward it gives was worth the effort to reach it. I think it is more than enough to say I have no interest in playing more of it just to confirm what I already know: it’s not great.