Gene Troopers is an FPS that has you
fighting your way through an alien spaceship and an alien planet, killing hordes
of aliens and ultimately trying to discover the whereabouts of your missing
daughter, whom you haven’t seen since you were both kidnapped. However, the
twist is that once you where kidnapped, the aliens performed all kinds of weird
DNA experiments on you, nearly making you into one of their brainwashed super
soldiers, before you are rescued by some fellow soldiers trying to topple the
alien’s nefarious plans.
Any of this sounding a little
familiar? Well, it may or may not, depending on how closely you’ve been
following the development of a little known upcoming FPS, Quake 4 (In that game,
your character becomes for all intents and purposes a Strogg, save for his
precious gray matter). However, the similarities that this game shares with
other FPS titles don’t stop there. Along the way you will gain access to a glove
that allows you to control various objects in the environment (a la Half Life
2), and a lot of the action will take place in narrow claustrophobic corridors
(a la Doom 3). Gene Troopers makes no qualms about borrowing quite liberally
from other well-known titles in its genre, taking bits and pieces from
successful games and inserting them. Fortunately, in this early build of the
game, none of the pieces felt unnecessarily juxtaposed, making for a fun and
exciting game.
The weaponry in Gene Troopers is
varied, giving you a full arsenal of alien weapons to use. You start out with a
handheld machine gun fitted with a silencer and the grip glove, which basically
functions as the gravity gun did in HL2. You can use the glove to hoist boxes,
tables, what have you and heave them at enemy soldiers. You can even grab
enemies and chuck them across the room. You’ll gain access to several other
weapons, like a rifle fitted with a scope and even a double-barreled mini-gun
(nice).
The gameplay has a few RPG elements
in it, allowing you to upgrade your characters abilities and attributes with DNA
points, which are gained by killing enemies. You can gain many different
abilities like night vision, neuron drift (which makes everything “bullet-time”
slow), regeneration and so on. You can switch these skills on the fly, or take
only those that you think you’ll need and level them up accordingly.
Graphically, the game needs that
essential coat of polish, but still looks pretty solid. The character models are
nicely detailed, and the rag doll physics is well implemented. The weapons look
cool and sport some nice details, as do the environments. The framerates need to
be cleaned up, but that’s usually one of the last things taken care of.
The sounds still needed quite a bit
of work. The music was pretty good at setting the mood, but some of the weapons
lacked sound or punch, and the voice acting was very corny.
However, these are pretty minor
gripes considering that we still have some time before the game goes gold. And
once it does, we should be treated to a pretty fun game that uses some of the
best elements that the genre has to offer.
