Gene Rain wants to combine a complex story with cover-based, third-person action.
Gears of War was something of a phenomenon when it arrived on the scene in 2006. It revolutionised the third-person action shooter with well-paced gameplay, solid mechanics that just plain worked, and an excellent multiplayer mode. It brought third-person cover-based shooting into the limelight and spawned a swathe of imitators. Gene Rain could have be counted amongst those imitators if it had been released in 2007, but I doubt it would be counted amongst the stronger ones.
Initial impressions aren’t bad, as the character models in the menus and loading screens are really quite good. Even the opening cutscenes look pretty nice in spite of a slightly stuttering framerate at times. Sadly, that’s where the positives end at this early stage, as the voice-over begins. Gene Rain is not made with English as its first language, but the translation here is incredibly poor. I recently reviewed ICEY — a game that was originally released in Chinese — that had a near flawless translation into English. By comparison, this is quite poor, and it isn’t helped by the subtitles both not matching the voice-over and being rife with spelling and punctuation errors. This persists throughout the game and made the plot near impossible to follow.
The game drops you straight into combat behind cover, with a brief (and poorly worded) explanation. This explanation covers basic movement, aiming, firing, dodging, and using cover. Strangely, this tutorial doesn’t cover how to change weapons. You need to wait a good hour or so for this to be covered in spite of it being somewhat important. The controls themselves are less than brilliant. Dodge rolls only work occasionally, leaping over cover can only be done once you have entered cover, reloading was unresponsive. These are only a few of the control problems I had, but they all make combat encounters more difficult than necessary.
The gameplay isn’t much better. Gene Rain wants to be like Gears of War, but everything lacks any sense of weight. The weapons sound weak and spray wildly, the cover is unreliable at best, and the pacing is all over the place. Even the damage indicators are inaccurate, pointing in seemingly random directions when you’re hit. On the plus side, the enemies are quite varied. Snipers, soldiers, mechanical spiders, air threats, and mechs all have different weapons and force you to move around the battlefield and prioritise your targets. The AI can be pretty good too as enemies don’t just stay put and pop their heads out. They move around cover, trying to get behind you, rushing you when you’re focused on another target. This was quite strong compared to the rest of the game.
During the four-or-so hours the campaign takes to complete, you will play as four characters. The three soldiers have the same weapons, but they each have their own special ability to use. These are slowing down time, deploying a shield, and launching a drone. It’s nice that they’re all distinct, but I would have liked the opportunity to select who I was playing as in each section. The fourth character is linked to the plot and simply has you looking for a few objects in the environment. This section was completely at odds with the rest of the game and only happens once. I don’t see why this wasn’t a cutscene split across the stages of the game.
Weapon parts and upgrade points are unlocked throughout the campaign, allowing you to upgrade your character in various ways. The upgrade trees are fairly ordinary, but it isn’t clear what some of the upgrades do thanks again to poorly worded descriptions. The weapon upgrades are clearer, and you can choose to spend your points on purchasing temporary special weapons. Just be aware that when you collect one of these special weapons, if you swap to a regular weapon then your new one will disappear! This was a significant waste of resources that could have been spent on upgrading something else.
Upon completion, Defensive War mode unlocks, which acts as a wave defence mode. You’ll select a character and hold off enemies over the course of five increasingly difficult waves. I’m not sure how this ends as the game wouldn’t progress past the fourth wave in spite of me defeating all the enemies. Yet another aspect of the game that doesn’t work properly. Even the achievements didn’t work correctly — only some of them unlocked over the course of the campaign.
Gene Rain dearly wants to be something else, but there is so much wrong with the game. The occasionally pretty graphics and reasonable AI don’t change the fact that there are a lot of flaws. From the story to gameplay, to basic controls, there’s a swathe of issues that need addressing here. With luck, the developers will take a look at what they’ve created here, take what they did well, and try again with something in the future.
Oh, and one of the achievements is titled ‘Gears of War’. Go figure.
Gene Rain is available now on PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
