So one fine day, I was browsing the web and I saw this on Rock Paper Shotgun. A free game now available for download? Cool! Count me in. Hence began my agonising attempts of trying to get the damn thing to work. Some intro on the game, Genesis AD is a free to play online shooter. It’s futuristic and vaguely looks like Vanquish.
I went to their website, downloaded this 1.2GB setup file for Genesis AD. Installation was trouble free and soon I had a shortcut on my desktop which, took me again to their website. Hmmmm what’s with their obsession with their own site? Okay fine, so I read their how to play guide and it says, you need to register an account. Once signed in their site just hit the play button.
Looks simple enough. Oh wait, why does the registration form require a first, middle and last name and only allow for 20 characters in total max? What they haven’t seen people with long names before? So after I truncated my name(sigh), I was able to register to the site.
Now I sign in and click on play, it downloads the same 1.2GB setup file again! Fail javascript! All right I look in my email and find that I need to verify my account. Click on the link in the email and got my account verified. Would it work now? NO!
Downloading GenesisADsetup.exe. Okay, I realise they have a client that might be required to launch this game? It’s called REACTOR(with all caps! go figure). Hmmm I would have expected them to make it clear on their site that you need this, but no, no notice about this whatsoever.
Fine! I download REACTOR(some 7.5MB) and try to install it. Say what? It fails halfway with some sort of javascript error. Great, retry. Now it’s taking forever to install. Seems to be downloading more stuff from their site. Overall took about 20 minutes to get this done. Finally, I must play game NOW! I click in the ijji REACTOR link on desktop. And…
Really? More Javascript errors. So I click Yes continue with scripts and get the damn client to run. Voila! Finally! This looks promising.
Signed in to REACTOR. More of these…
Javascript bla bla bla, yes continue…
What's this? I spent all this time to download a 1.2GB setup file and jumping through all these hoops only to reach another inspecting client file? Time left 65 minutes?(it doesn’t show here but it takes an hour). Just how much of crap do you put up with to play this game?
I finally get into the game and realise there are two servers to pick from, US west or East. Anyway I’m not going to give up now after all that hassle. I jump in and go through the tutorials. Genesis AD is a class based shooter with some action game type special abilities. You can do a jump dash(which will warp you across what seems like a huge distance) and double jump(to get up a ledge for instance).
There are three classes, assault, sniper and supplier. Each class has its own set of weapons and moves at different speeds. The supplier whom I suppose is the scout, moves the fastest and the sniper can cloak. Genesis AD is one of those shooters where you accrue some sort of online store point to purchase better weapons.
I’m not completely convinced that this model of online shooters work well from a game design perspective. I’m sure they make money with the micro transactions for weapons(which is why we see more of these free shooters). Balance is a huge issue that I don’t think Genesis AD solves either as I found myself being outclassed even in the beginner servers. No, it’s not just me sucking, the other players had more powerful weapons.
I guess it depends on your perspective. If you are okay with a mediocre shooter(this is no Vanquish) which has paper thin class difference, the usual multiplayer shooter game modes(deathmatch, CTF, a mode where everyone is a sniper etc), jumping through hoops to even run the game, and some bugyness(you can’t shoot though railings or any gaps in them), then I suppose Genesis AD isn’t that bad.
If you’re willing to install all the necessary software to play this thing(which comes with some middleware) just to listen to an announcer that sounds like Duke Nukem(yeah the announcer sounds like Duke), then go check it out here. Me? I’m uninstalling all the crap I installed to get this game running.
Note: When I launched the REACTOR client for the third time(at a later time), I didn’t get any javascript errors any more. Perhaps it was an issue on their end.
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