Project Genom First Impressions

Project Genom is the latest in a recent surge of MMORPGs that are challenging traditional tab-targeting combat systems by providing a non-targeting, action-based combat system. All of the familiar MMO systems are here—including strong elements of PvE and questing—but combat comes in shooter form. The question is whether the shooter and MMO halves form a cohesive whole or if they end up getting in each other’s way.

Having just entered paid alpha it’s hard to say that Project Genom will be a definitively good MMORPG with a vast array of activities to partake in. The base is there and you can both shoot and quest, but that’s hardly all that they have planned. PvP is not currently in, crafting doesn’t exist, the only option you have for customizing your character is skin color, and the systems that are in place are rudimentary. That being said, these are my impressions based on what does exist.

I’m happy to report that shooting in Project Genom generally feels good. The game takes place entirely in a over-the-shoulder third-person camera angle. It’s not an incredibly deep or nuanced shooter—instead resembling something closer to Saints Row 3—but it is solid and the developers have clearly spent time making sure that players will enjoy shooting any foes that cross their path. It is a skill-based system so you will not have to worry about a random number generator deciding that your perfectly-aligned shot didn’t hit. Unfortunately, due to the simplistic AI, it is significantly easier to sit still and shoot at your opponents than it is to move around and shoot. Dodging enemies that attack at melee range is near-impossible and moving only reduces your own accuracy.

Furthermore, nearly everything about the handling of ammo is bizarre. Ammo is obtained from Ammo Crates that are littered around zones outside of the core spaceship hub. When you visit one you will instantly be given a full stock of ammo at no cost. I find this design odd for an MMORPG.

Weapons don’t currently handle reloading well. If you reload a partial clip, whatever was left over will be discarded. The game will then take a full clip from your reserves and load it into the gun. If you’re constantly reloading after a big fight, chances are that you will be visiting the ammo crates quite often.

Unfortunately, the melee combat does not feel nearly as nice as the shooting combat. Currently, it is a bit sloppy and inconsistent. Clicking won’t always cause your player character to swing their weapon. The swings that do occur are slow and cannot be chained. You get a small variety of animations but the swings all take exactly the same amount of time and do exactly the same mediocre amount of damage.

Questing is standard fare. You won’t see anything unique in Project Genom. You will be running between NPCs and various other nodes, using items in your inventory, killing enemies, collecting various items, and repeating. There are a few quests that are automatically added to your quest list based on certain actions, such as killing a specific number of enemies in a specific area.

However, quests have a number of issues. They are poorly labeled. Sometimes they aren’t labeled at all. Once you’ve picked up a quest the objective can be difficult to decipher based on what the quest log displays. It’s unclear at first that a quest can be a series of objectives with a reward at the end, rather than a reward for that specific objective. I’m also not convinced that questing zones have enough spawns. A single player can run through and wipe every enemy in a specific spawn zone out within a minute. This is the case for every spawn zone that I had encountered. I had played during the off-hours, which meant that relatively few players were out and about, but during primetime hours, I can anticipate a deficit of mobs being a major issue. The one mitigating factor is that it appears that everyone who does damage to a mob receives credit. For better or for worse, loot currently seems to be a free-for-all between all nearby players.

To make matters worse several quests tie into each other oddly. Quest objectives will randomly pop in and out of your quest tracker as you progress through each quest. Usually, this is a sign that you will indirectly complete a quest through another. For example, in one quest I had to obtain a key to a warehouse in order to obtain a piece of gear. In the process I somehow obtained a flash drive I needed for another quest, an objective that had removed itself from my quest log despite the previous objective having been show. It is a minor annoyance but can make the questing experience quite confusing.

The rewards for completing these quests are fairly paltry. You will get a few pieces of gear in the first hour, but it won’t come close to a full set. I resorted to buying the rest of the set I had begun to pick pieces from and two new weapons. For the most part you will get experience, credits, and an assortment of quest items that can neither be sold nor destroyed. My inventory quickly filled up with junk items that I could not get rid of. Perhaps it will be fixed in the near future.

Characters have a combination of stats that you can assign a set amount of points to per level and skills that raise with use. Players get five points per level to assign to any of six different stats. These stats affect their basic character traits, such as energy, damage, and health. They then have skills for each type of armor, each type of weapon, and more that increase with use. To gain points in your Tactical Armor skill, you don Tactical Armor and sit in an enemy spawn zone, letting them beat on you. To raise your Assault Rifle skill you equip an Assault Rifle and shoot things. To my knowledge skills have no caps and every single one can be leveled on a single character. Both character level and skill level determine whether you can equip a specific piece of gear.

Where Project Genom truly falls short, however, is in overall presentation. The game world itself is provided in vibrant, well-designed areas that look even better thanks to the special effects that are possible in Unreal Engine 4. The voice-overs—currently a mix of Russian and English—are well-done and add to the atmosphere quite a bit. However, the UI is subpar. While information is easy to find it is not presented well. The UI is presented as a simplistic set of transparent gray boxes. Each of the menus is fairly crowded, with some missing information entirely. Some tooltips from interacting with items will come up completely blank. Various strings of text are not translated  yet. There is help text that runs off the screen and never goes away. It is possible to open the Escape menu over dialogue. The health bar looks quite bad and I am hoping that it is a placeholder.

The one feature that looks halfway decent is the minimap, but it has its own issues. Various locations and key NPCs aren’t marked at all unless they are required for the current quest. Other players and mobs aren’t market at all. Area bubbles marked on the map are very inaccurate. The height of your objective is not indicated at all. It can, at times, make it even harder to find what you are looking for than it needs to be.

In the future Project Genom could be a completely different game. Currently, there is a solid base with enjoyable shooting mechanics. The problem is that the game is currently missing the majority of its systems and those that are there have a number of outstanding issues. The UI is a bit of a mess. The lack of crafting and PvP arenas leaves much to be desired from the experience. The current questing experience could also use a number of minor objective adjustments and better indication of what the player should be doing. If you can’t wait to get in on the next MMO shooter, you could do worse for a minimum investment of $19.99. For everyone else, I would recommend waiting until it has been further developed and more core systems have been introduced.