I’ve been waiting an eternity for the final release of Genetos. Okay, so it was more like fourteen months or thereabouts from the point I discovered the preview in the sadly defunct Shoot The Core database to version 1.0 appearing, but it felt that long because that demo was fantastic, a journey from monochrome gallery shooters through to the current generation of story-driven bullet hell – it’s hard not to fall in love with that! So when a couple of news sources mentioned that the final release was a go, I waited rather apprehensively for Firefox to download it. Those nerves were because there was always the horrible chance that delay had caused my expectations to be raised well above whatever the final game could hope to be or even worse that it had been “over cooked”…
I needn’t have worried; Genetos honestly betters anything I could ever have expected of it.
The game is divided into five levels that loosely represent generations in the evolution of the genre, starting out slowly with a pastiche of Space Invaders and, as the titular attackers are destroyed, they drop green pick-ups which can be collected to charge the item bar at the bottom of the screen and, when that reaches the 800 mark, it’s time for a boss fight! Continuing to collect tokens and maxing out the bar leads to player’s ship performing a “generation shift”, transforming it and bolting on the features that implies; the first shift adds vertical control over half the play area, the second opens that up entirely and bolts on a smart bomb, the third adds a slow down button to the control system and so forth. The newly-upgraded player can then twonk the boss and continue to the next generation.
Version 0.6 contained four generations which were great fun to play through but despite appearing complete the final generation has taken lone developer Tatsuya Koyama a year because it literally doubles the overall length of the game to the point where it could’ve been released on it’s own; it’s divided into five sub-chapters titled birth, variation, selection, prosperity and extinction, each appropriately populated.
The way a player approaches Genetos will affect the weapons they’re given as the ship evolves and there are some achievement-style ways to get alternative firepower such as not evolving during the first boss battle or entering the fourth level with five or less ships remaining. A favourite power-up simply has to be the “summon” weapon that temporarily drags previously defeated bosses back into battle, duking it out on the player’s side! There’s a neat “free play” mode on the main menu to unlock that allows any level, generation of ship and weapon previously gained during play to be selected, these mix-and-match games don’t count for high scores, obviously, but doing things like taking the final ship with a summoned boss in tow into the first or second level is ridiculously funny!
That story of the shoot ‘em up is a big part of Genetos and in beginner and standard modes at least it’s pretty easy and extremely generous with the lives because it wants that story told in it’s entirety. A few people have already commented on the “message” behind the madness, that shoot ‘em ups in general have wandered into something of an evolutionary cul-de-sac and, whilst that’s perhaps true to some degree, Genetos proves that there’s not only far more variety to the genre than many people realise, the old dog still has a significant amount of it’s health bar remaining so covering even heavily worn ground can be interesting and entertaining if handled well by a sympathetic developer.
And yes, I know that having two glowing reviews in a row is going to make me look like a “fair weather reviewer” (I’ll have to find something crap to write about, for balance or something) but Genetos is something truly amazing. If it wasn’t downloading in the background as you read this, it bloody well should have been!
