Developer: Deeli Network
Publisher: Deeli Network
Platform: PC, Xbox One, PS4
Tested on: Xbox One
Gene Rain – Review
Gene Rain is a game made by Deeli Network: a developer and publisher you probably never heard of. Gene Rain looks like a slick game when judging from the screenshots and trailers, yet with this specific title nothing is what it seems to be. Read and shiver as a game unfolds itself to show the horror that lies underneath.
Story
The story of Gene Rain is not only vague, it’s flat-out bad. It’s a mix of clichés about aliens invading, robots and a mysterious kid with psychic powers. These elements are arranged from random encounters with characters to elements such as a declaration of martial law. Cutscenes are a bit chaotic and unclear, not to mention badly animated. It’s very poorly written and even worse quality English than you can imagine. If you are a so-called ”grammar-nazi”, this game will totally make you throw your controller through your TV and a couple of walls. In between the lines characters have while playing, and the cutscenes between levels, the story has nothing of quality to add to the game.
Graphics
Actually, the graphics are rather fine. At least the in-game graphics and the loading screens are. Plenty of smooth special effects such as armor glow and shine. The animations in-game are also not that bad compared to the disaster it could have been like the rest of the game. That would have really made this review complete. The cutscenes, however, are living up to the overall reputation of Gene Rain. Distorted, laggy, with lip sync like somebody is playing with muppets on screen. It’s a type of performance you would expect from the Xbox Classic, but most definitely not on the Xbox One. It’s the type of performance you get when you put stressed out people with no work experience to work on what’s supposed to be an AAA-resembling title.
Sound
Pretty much every voice in this game sounds like the voice actor bought a two dollar microphone from a thrift shop, hooked its outgoing signal up to a guitar speaker with distortion function, and recorded that sound with their cellphone. It’s just amazing. No other game will give you such great production values. Damn, they really must have spent tons on this game. This becomes even more noticeable when you get into a fight and the epic background music starts. At least eight full seconds of the same ridiculously good tune gets looped. If the sound had a visual watermark, it would say ”Copyrighted, for testing purposes only. Get the full track by licensing it now.”And the voice acting, damn, it’s so good. Probably the guys who sold the microphone in the thrift store were noticed for their proper English and hired instantly. Way to go creating job opportunities in the community guys! How can this game be any more awesome you ask? Well, that’s where the gameplay kicks in.
Gameplay
Gene Rain is a third-person shooter where you fight your way through enemies in small levels as you switch between characters in service of the story you are following. Mostly you run through about three areas where one or more waves of enemies come towards you before you proceed to the next level. And boy is it fun to do. It’s even so fun that the genius coders of the game decided that once you turn off your console, every bit of progress and save games you created, won’t be around anymore when you start it back up! So inventive! It’s obvious they thought everything well-through before they released this game. It totally doesn’t destroy any painful effort you might be taking to get through what’s already an unstable and plain way of gaming.
Each character you play with has a slightly different arsenal that’s also still basically the same. Two automated guns, a long distance powerful gun, and grenades. Besides this, they have a special power such as a shield or a drone that can be summoned to help you out in battle. Using your special power drains your energy bar, which you also use for running around. This means that you have to decide if you want to run or do something more powerful on the battlefield. Besides this, most battles come down to Western-type shoot-outs. Hide behind cover, shoot the enemies. If you die, which even happens because you get hit through a wall at times, you probably have to watch some boring conversation again and waste time, but who cares right?
The problem with everything that’s Gene Rain, is that it tries to copy a lot of other games in its gameplay. There’s a bit of everything in there with gameplay like Gears of War, but everything is so poorly executed that it’s more of a parody cult-product that you can’t even place anywhere. It’s like an arcade game with mission-elements and like watching a bad movie with sci-fi and action elements. It’s nothing of its own, yet bad enough to be identified as ”Gene Rain”.
Conclusion
Dropping the sarcasm and speaking in all honesty, apart from most of the graphics, Gene Rain is an unfinished and bad game that should clearly have never been released in its current state. It’s disrespectful to do something like this towards players worldwide, the money they saved, and basically, the beautiful platform that is gaming. It lacks professionalism in almost everything it does with weird English, disgusting sound and poor design and programming. Hopefully, you read this before buying the game and don’t ever waste the money it clearly doesn’t deserve.
Gene Rain - Review,
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