Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade Review

Genesis Rising on Steam - store.steampowered.com/app/3230/Genesis_Rising/ I'm glad to see a lot of people thought they imagined this game. It's a lot to take in.

Hearing "the last unexplored galaxy" is such a grand fucking statement if you understand anything about the sheer unhumanly absurd scale of the universe and it's delivered with all the gravitas of a dude telling you your coffee is ready.

Hi, @MandaloreGaming, I'm one of the Genesis Rising's developers. Thank you for doing this excellent and humorous review - surprised that you dug it out after all this time, I enjoyed watching it very much, and considering how flawed the game was, you were actually very kind :) None of us at Metamorf had any previous professional experience whatsoever at the beginning of the production - a few of us did some experimental game development as a hobby, but nothing nearly close to this scale, so it was a madness to start it with such a small team, and a miracle that it actually came out. The production took many years because we were also building the engine from scratch, together with all the tools for world-editing and directing in-game real-time interactive sequences (which was bleeding-edge tech for that time and wasn't used at all, the publisher decided for pre-rendered cutscenes), with its own visual scripting language embedded, designed specifically for directing cinematic scenes that vary depending on information from simulation and vice versa. The idea was to be able to see the fleet you designed through the main ship's window during the dialogues, it was fully implemented and cut out from the final game in favour of video-clips. The multiplayer code supported hundreds of entities in the scene over the very slow modems of that time, which most of the games in that era didn't have. Multiplayer mode was actually the main focus of development, and the best part of the game, inspired very much by Orson Scott Card's book Ender's Game - it was full 3D at the begining, with all the problems with orientation that being in zero-gravity brings, so it was "nailed" to a 2D plane later in development; it even had realistic physical movement of spaceships (accelerated half of the way and then thrusted in the other direction to stop at a designated point), but that made spatial distances and all strategies around them totally meaningless, so we threw that out too. The multiplayer idea never took off with the publisher as it required additional investment for server maintenance etc, but it was actually fun to play in LAN, not sure if it's possible with the released version. We did most of that work (engine, the world-editor and the game) with 4 (in letters: four) developers, and 6-8 artists, depending on the moment. The budget was actually miserable, until in the last year the publisher jumped in, doubled the team and "spiced up" the production value with cinematics. I still cringe at those Warhammer-like armors and the ship interiors with blinking lights, because originally everything was organic, like in the Cruciform comic book - from the elegant suits with veins growing on human bodies, to command room that looked like a crosover between a whale's stomach and a cathedral. The style of characters in the initial version was also much more cartoony and could be described as "Disney meets David Cronenberg in H.R. Giger's living room", but all of that was dropped by publisher as it was considered "too East-European", and replaced with something they thought Warhammer or H.A.L.O. audience would like more. Flawed as it was, this project was started in the moment when the game industry didn't exist AT ALL in our freshly bombed country, exausted by a decade of wars. It has demonstrated that even in those circumstances, it is not impossible to start and finish (albeit with sticks and ropes) a fully fledged "almost AAA" game, and has inspired many others to get into the industry, which is today very healthy and growing in Serbia. Thank you once again for the review, it is much appreciated.

I honestly love the idea of "All of the universe exists to annoy one guy because God thinks it's funny to mess with the first being he ever made". It makes God look like he's one of those Roller Coaster Tycoon players who build Mister Bones' Wild Ride and just sit there, watching it, giggling to himself the entire time.

I kind of really like how casual some elements of this are. Like...the universe is conquered, humanity drives around nightmare-ships but people still get blasted on alcohol and get horny about boobs. There's something kind of striking about the fact these people are still fundamentally human. And man, so much stuff in this game needs another swing taken at it. There are SO many cool ideas here.

In like, a Bioware RPG or something, the ending final battle being yourself versus the yourself-who-picked-the-other-endings is actually pretty fun idea for a final battle.

This setting is insane. The WHOLE universe being explored gave me pause but calling someone on the phone actually summoning a clone of them made me take a break.

Tbh the opening father-son bonding time actually does fit the nightmarish setting, but it lacks one critical element: The perspective of the outsider. I’m reminded of the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that features Picard being tortured by the Cardassians. At one point the torturer is sitting in the interrogation cell with his daughter on his knee, doting on her as he tortures Picard. Picard asks him how he could allow a child to witness such horror, at which point the torturer is genuinely confused, and asks him why, given that his daughter has been taught that enemies of the Cardassian state deserve their fate. This scene is missing its Picard-analogue. To Iconah and his father, this genuinely is a fun, super-cool outing between father and son. A genuine heartfelt bit of bonding. To an outsider, it is a father teaching his son how to best order a giant slave-beast to kill. But without the outsider, that part is de-emphasized. We only experience it through the eyes of the characters present.

I love how essentially the "conspiracy" of the government already controlling the universe is to do the exact same thing but even better this time They literally want to do New Game+. It's brilliant

Humanity going on a universe-wide genocidal campaign to search for some mythical item just to rewind time to make an even stronger human empire is 100% A+ human writing. The aliens that wrote this script knew what they were doing!

Having the final battle in a time travel plot be against yourself from the different endings, that's downright inspired.

"So we don't get the more sentimental bits of H. R. Geiger's Eragon." Mandy why have you cursed me with such an amazing concept that I will never be able to experience? A concept like that sounds so fucking amazing yet I know it cannot exist.

The idea of the final boss of a video game with multiple endings being the you's who chose the other endings is actually kind of dope. I can maybe imagine this working in a fully-fledged RPG? Maybe the other you's could have different classes, abilities, and personalities than your current character to give you a taste of different playstyles to incentivize you to replay it. They could even allude to other events you never saw because of the choices you made on your current playthrough.

Playing the Xavier Renegade Angel music over Iconah talking with alternate versions of himself is genius

My brother and me went to a bootleg game store when we were kids and we ended up picking this game up simply because of the cover art

Fun facts about the Lapis: 1. Their biggest ships are actually carved PLANETS. 2. You can steal their builder ships and build your own Lapis. 3. Lapis means "Stone" in Latin.

Between this, Vangers, Hammerfight and more weird games than I can remember, I'm astounded how Slavs are so good at building fascinating worlds.

I couldn’t help but laugh when Mandalore cut to homeworld for a breather during the bit that can only be described as the “future’s future future”.

I'm still struggling to parse how the gorgeous yet nightmarish biomechanical ship designs are part of the same game where the cutscenes look like id Software's version of Xavier Renegade Angel.

My word, the setting without the cutscenes is one of the most genuinely horrifying future sci-fi settings I’ve experienced. The ship designs are so inspired. I hope someone does pick this setting up one day and does the potential justice.