Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #7222 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: JoWood
• Released on: 2007-05-04
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade takes place in the very distant future, three thousand years after what humans believe was the arrival of the saviour. The human race has conquered most of the Universe. They consider themselves a divine race, and think of all aliens as inferior; those that do not obey are punished or destroyed. The dominion of the Human race was insured by organids - genetically designed organic machines, easily adaptable to any enemy strategy. Only one part of the Universe remains unconquered. It is the galaxy where the Universal Heart, an enigmatic entity that spawned all life and matter into the universe, is hidden. At least, that's what the Humans believe. The player will take on a role of Captain Iconah, a battle-hardened fleet commander and a brilliant genetic designer, sent on a quest to explore and conquer the Universal Heart.

Customer Reviews

Wasted possibilities
The RTS game Genesis Rising presents an immensely intriguing idea poorly executed.

You take control of organic vessels in a universe where the human race is bent on domination in its search for the universal heart and where blood is literally the only currency.

The game play takes place deep in space where resources are limited and you are forced to predate the ships you destroy for precious blood resource and additional mutation genes.

The best aspect of the game is the concept of building organic ships and mutating them with a series of genes. Each gene bolsters your ships defence, attack or other capabilities. Genes are available in a series of lvl's (1-5 such as ive found so far) with additionally lvl's massively its respective ability.

You gain resources by harvesting blood from large organic stations. The blood can be used to produce ships, as trade currency and further to build the genes used to modify your vessels. To a large extent the economic (resource gathering) aspect of this RTS is totaly missing.

Unfortunately the races available to play are all incredibly similar, differing in appearance only. There are really only 3 combat ships available to each race with a few support ships. However the most limiting capacity of the game is the incredibly short maintenance cap making it all but impossible to control more than half a dozen ships at any one time, gone are the dreams of commanding a fleet.

Most disappointing of all are the elegant organic ships, initially very appealing I cant help but feel they dropped the ball by not providing graphics modifications to each ship for each gene modification added.

Campaign missions are well structured and balanced to the system making for an enjoyable challenging experience. The limited fleet structure even forces very tactical game play. For and RTS game the ohh so important multiplayer/skirmish mode is rather different lacking the enjoyment inherent to most RTS games due mostly to the lack of units you can control.

Although set in the 3D aspect of space, game play takes place on a 2D grid laid across the battlefield, while this makes navigation somewhat easier, this is an issue previous and successfully resolved by many other games.

All in the game feels like an excellent idea put to market long before it was fully developed. I will eagerly look out for a sequel as with a few more resources to collect (perhaps biomatter or respirable gasses) and a vastly increased diversity of fleet the concept has vast potential.

In the pantheon of RTS greats Genesis Rising has much to learn from fore bares such like the Age of Empires trilogy, the novel Perimeter and the eagerly awaited StarCraft 2

Fresh, innovative!
I've just downloaded the demo and had a quick play on the tutorial and beggining campaigns, and I'm already hooked.

If you're looking for an in depth, micro managing space game, this is not going to be suitable for you. However, despite this game's simplicity of scope, it is incredibly fun to play, and the visuals are quite beautiful. The music is fairly epic sounding and not too repetitive.

This seems to be a merging of tried and tested RPG and RTS concepts. There are hints at influences from Star Trek: Armada, and, of course, Age of Empires, only in that it has the basic formula of RTS unit construction. However, there does not seems to be the function for building stations/bases; this may be a limitation of the Demo. Still, most of the ships that the player's mothership can build offer varied and useful RTS functions.

The most innovative element of this game is that the ships and stations are organic...and the currency is blood. Strange, but fun! And for weapons, you get genes which can be harvested and implanted into ships to use against the enemy. Many of the genes provide bizarre functions, an example is the parasitic egg which can infect enemy ships.

Factions within the game's campaign are the Human Empire, The Defiance, a strange alien race called Lupis, and the Cybernetic traders. There may be others, but I didn't see any in the demo.

Good, but didn't measure up
Brought this game a little while back, near to when it first came out.

I'll not lie, it is a good looking game, fun and fairly challenging at times (right at the end) but it has aimed and missed.

Yes, its fun to morph the ships around and change their weapons, customising them on the fly, but changing the weapons around doesnt really add up to much. Not only this, but some of the long range weapons make parts of the campian painfully easy. Ive shot up many a heavily armed spacestation from a distance at no cost to myself.

The flaws are many though, I'll start with the fact that this is another shot at Homeworld, by the feel of it, but it isnt even technically in the same genre. Although this is set in space, you cannot (like in homeworld) move in 3 dimensions meaning its not a 3D RTS. Up and down dont exsist, so it might as well be set on an ocean.

On top of that, theres no micromanagment (which some ppl think is good) but this is done simply by massivly limiting the number of ships you can have in space at any one time, giving the feel of being small and insignificant.

In the end, if you don't expect this game to hit the homeworld mark, and just want something to ammuse you once for about a week then buy the game (don't pay more then a tenner though). If you've been living on mars and dont know what I mean by Homeworld, then buy that and its two brethren instead.

Even Project earth was marginally better then this, and a true 3D RTS.