Gene Troopers review

In these days of genetic engineering there are those who think it's a bad idea and those who engineer mutant super soldiers. Which side do you come down on?

I always wonder why publishers and developers decide that what the world needs is another FPS. There are several really good titles already on the market catering all of the markets so newcomers have to really impress to get a look in. Competition's a good thing, of course, but in a world where we're playing Half Life 2, Unreal Tournament, Doom and Far Cry, Gene Troopers is entering a market that's almost saturated with quality games. None the less Playlogic is taking the gamble that it can do what so many First Person Shooters fail to do and bring something new to the genre. Promising character development and the game engine from Deus Ex, Gene Troopers might be onto something.

Molecular Manipulation

There is a story behind Gene Troopers but frankly you won't want to bother with it. The voice acting throughout is dire and the cutscenes are poorly put together. After the opening scene you'll find that you can't skip the scenes fast enough. For what its worth, the story takes place a long way into the future your character and his daughter are travelling on a spaceship heading for a planet on the far edge of the universe. Your ship is hijacked and all of the people onboard are taken to be transformed into genetically enhanced soldiers for a distant army.

Your transformation is interrupted by mercenaries and you join forces with them to try and get your daughter back. It's pretty corny and the dialogue is so poorly read that for all intents and purposes you find yourself running around fighting mutated bad guys with some comrades. You have undergone some transformation though and you find that you have some special powers and the ability to absorb the genetic material from your enemies once you have dispatched them. This slightly replenishes your health and allows you upgrade your special powers as you go through the game.

DNA Sequencing

Modifying and upgrading your character is certainly a novel feature, not unique but certainly uncommon. There are various categories that you can spend your DNA points on from more health and an energy shield to better battle vision and Darth Vader style death grip. This is about the size of the character customisation but it allows you to slightly customise the playing experience. It isn't revolutionary and it isn't very deep but it is a good effort and it does add to the immersive experience of the game.

Your special powers from the genetic enhancement are limited to being a good shot with any weapon you can get your hands on (naturally) and being able to use a force glove. This is a nod to the gravity gun in Half Life 2 and allows players to pick up objects and throw them around. This ability can be upgraded so that it becomes a weapon. It helps to get Gene Troopers noticed but it's more of a short term novelty.

Eco Warriors

The stand-out feature in Gene Troopers is the visual quality. The graphics are maybe not up to the standard of HL2 or Doom3 but they're pretty good none the less. There's plenty of detail on the characters and the weapons. Lighting is used to fantastic effect with lots of unusual light sources including crates that help to pick out the detail that's been lavished on the set design.

Transparency is well used in conjunction with the lighting and some of the scenery even pulses as if alive with all of the genetic manipulation going on inside it. In short the visuals are impressive. The only real problem is the character animations. They're not bad but you sort of expect better when you're looking at such great surroundings. The animations for the characters get even worse in the death sequences. It’s not that the ragdoll deaths are bad it's just that the computer uses them to fool you into thinking that you've killed someone when you haven't.

If you shoot an enemy a couple of times in the chest then they fall over as if dead. They then spring back up once you've moved on and shoot you in the back. They're really dead if you can see the purple orb of genetic material spring out off them. The enemy AI is also not what you'd expect. You can forgive the first couple of levels for having rather slow and poor shooting enemies but you expect them to still behave like the tougher enemies you expect to meet later on.

Gene Troopers shuns your expectations here and presents you with dim but accurate enemies at the start and all the way through. When cover is available they don't use it, when you're shooting at them they don't evade. The enemies also have a range problem and don't spot you until you get fairly close, trip an alarm or start shooting. This can leave them staring straight at you and doing nothing.

Genetic Mutation

You might expect high things from all of the presentation in a good looking game. Sadly the first presentation letdown is with the menu system. You can navigate parts with either the keyboard or mouse and other parts with just the mouse. I use a computer for a substantial amount of time every day as a professional programmer and games journalist and I dislike using the mouse. When I get the chance to navigate a menu with the keyboard that's what I use and I hated that as soon as I started navigating the menu with the keyboard I was forced to switch to the mouse for no apparent reason.

That might not be such a big deal to some people but I wish developers would allow keyboard shortcuts and keyboard navigation for everything in a menu, I only want to use the mouse once I start playing and not to slow down my data entry. The next let down on the presentation is in the sound department. The sound effects are minimal and workmanlike. There are few sound effects and background music sections and what there is isn't great. The voice acting, as I've said, is poorly read, poorly acted and poorly scripted. Even the panning effect of the voices is poor and exaggerated so turning just slightly away from the person speaking to you causes their sound to jump completely to one speaker.

Double Helix

Gene Troopers falls short of many of the marks that can help a FPS title to stand out from the crowd. The sound, animation, story and enemy AI are all lacking to some extent. This causes the game to be a lot less fun than it should be. The lack of story means that you're running around without a purpose and the lack of enemy AI really make this a rather flat feeling title. On the plus side Gene Troopers does try to implement different features to make it stand out on the shelf. To be honest though, I doubt if this matters as much to gamers as getting the rest of it right. It just seems that time spent putting this feature in could have been spent tuning the game, improving the AI, hiring some good actors and getting some good music recorded.

The game looks good and there's no denying that. The developer has clearly put time into this area to design good maps and lighting schemes. The graphics aren't quite up to the standards of the leading games in this genre but they're not too far behind. They may not be used for benchmarking graphics cards but they certainly aren't the area of the game that's holding it back. In short, Gene Troopers is a decent game. It's not terrible but it certainly has problems. If you're bored of the top games in this genre then it might be worth a look but otherwise there are definitely better examples of this type out there, go and check out Call of Duty 2, F.E.A.R. or Doom 3.