Gene Troopers

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.