While pundits have questioned the place of PC gaming in a console-dominated world, the real-time strategy genre has thrived. The past several months has seen games such as Supreme Commander, Company of Heroes and C&C 3: Tiberium Wars hitting the shelves, games that require a great deal from those who play them in terms of juggling the micromanaging clusters of troops with watching the big picture of the global situation. Into this mix comes Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade, a game that will probably last longest in my mind as a reminder that no matter how hot a genre may seem, it is quite possible to introduce a really bad game into its midst.

Genesis Rising doesn't look like a bad game - the graphics are top notch, the sound effects and soundtrack are very well done and the impression is solid throughout. The overall presentation is very effective at creating a moody environment, filled with organic spaceships and bloody battles, in a universe that's presented in three dimensions but features a two-dimensional grid of play. Some of the details don't work as well though - the characters in the cut scenes are not very believable, and neither are their voices or the translated dialog.

But the problem isn't in the presentation - in fact, everything right up until you start playing the game is done very well. The basic story and concept of organic ships, or ones carved from various natural elements, which are then outfitted and augmented with genetic elements, is a really great idea - if you want to go faster then you get a speed augmentation, or if you want to build a stealth unit then you give it the appropriate genes, and so on. The storyline offers branching based on whether you make good or evil choices in dialog trees, and it offers plenty of alien races to interact with and even neutral races to win over to your side. As I said, everything right up until the main part of playing the game is really intriguing.

The basic gameplay is classic strategy - you need to build units of various types for battle, harvest genes from defeated ships to expand your capabilities (okay, that part is different), and explore the galaxy, taking on missions and battling alien ships. The game is largely mouse controlled, but there are plenty of keys to access all of the options for trade, battle, gene production and everything else you need. Again, at this point, everything was indicating that a wonderful strategy experience lay ahead. However, the expression "In space no one can hear you scream" doesn't hold true when you're yelling at your computer monitor in frustration…

My first real hint that things weren't going to work out so well was when I was in the tutorial with three ships under my command. The first problem was that the game decided I needed a different camera perspective and zoom factor to see everything - despite the fact that I had just changed it myself to get things laid out conveniently. Then the tutorial suggested that I manually move ships around to avoid incoming missiles. That seemed to be taking micromanagement to an unnecessarily high level, but I gave it a shot. It worked, and I survived the attack - at least, the two new ships survived; I was so busy evading attacks that I failed to keep my best armed ship alive. This awful balance between micromanagement and the big picture sadly dominate the game. Most strategy games have you building many units with the knowledge that quite a few will fall on the battlefield - that is simply the cost of doing battle. It took me a long time to get used to dealing with 'acceptable losses' in a battle, but figuring out that there is a boundary between what you expect to lose and what you can stand to lose is critical to advancing in these games, something that's contrary to role-playing games or small-group strategy games. But the image that kept coming into my mind as I played Genesis Rising was that of the GBA game Fire Emblem, in which I always needed all of my units and would replay a battle if I was ever foolish enough to let a critical character fall in battle.

The problem is that you get too many ships to possibly be able to control them all in real time, and too few that you can afford to lose any of them. Add to that the difficulties with the camera and trying to control the ships you do have, and you have a recipe for extended frustration. The action plays out as quickly as other strategy games, but moving the ships around happens extremely slowly - you will often spend longer waiting for a battle to start than it will take to resolve! The level of control you can exert over individual ships is inadequate, from manually avoiding missiles to changing genes on the fly to forcing certain attack moves and more. Ships move very ponderously, and while you are waiting for one to position itself as you commanded, your enemy has destroyed another of your key ships. The harder you try to make it all work, the more you become frustrated with the interface; it just seems like you are not being allowed to properly control your fleet in an adequate fashion - if you had hordes of disposable drone ships it would be much more acceptable, but since every ship matters the effect on the gameplay is devastating.

The worst question you can hear in a multiplayer game is "What if they threw a co-op match and nobody came?" But that is the issue here - there is simply no one playing the game online, which is unfortunate, because it seems that similarly hampered human players would make for a more even match and therefore a better experience. But even in the limited amount of multiplayer action I experienced, it seemed that the player who was quickest and most efficient at gene harvesting would be in position to attack first and almost inevitably emerge victorious. While that is somewhat true in every strategy game, it feels more rushed here and much less strategic. Given time and a larger pool of players than the single person I played against things might be different, but there it is.

The more time I spent playing Genesis Rising: The Universal Crusade, the more frustrated and disappointed I became. I can easily forgive the niggling issues with translation and voice acting, since the presentation is otherwise solid. I can also forgive the terribly slow pace of ships traversing space. But what I cannot forgive is that the combat is horribly balanced - it is the worst of both worlds, a game that demands overwhelming levels amounts of micromanagement yet provides entirely too few tools and opportunities to make it happen. And while the single player campaigns of many strategy games are lacking, they tend to make up for it with robust multiplayer. The opposite is true with Genesis Rising - there might be some fun in a multiplayer game, but the single player aspects are the best, and that is not a good thing in this case.

Reviewed by Michael Anderson for AceGamez (All Rights Reserved).