Mistakes were made.

Everyone remembers Gears of War, right? How can you not? Spawning multiple sequels, a comic book series, and much more, Epic Games’ Gears revolutionized the cover-based 3rd person shooter. Now, Chinese developer Deeli Network tries their hand at the Gears of War style game with Gene Rain. It can’t be that difficult, right? Well, apparently, I was wrong. DEAD wrong.

Gene Rain is a cover-based 3rd person shooter that takes place in the “distant?” future. Aliens and robots alike have devastated Earth, and with a story spanning different time periods during a war between the factions players take on the role of three different characters telling the story of betrayal, survival, and conflict. That last bit I just made up, because I honestly couldn’t tell you what the story is about because this game does a really bad job of telling it.

Platforms: XB1, PS4, PC
MSRP: $29.99
Price I’d pay: Haha. Yeah, don’t buy this

Let me explain. The reason why most of this game is confusing is due to poor translation from Chinese to English. Both the voiced dialog and the subtitles are in so much broken English that I could never make heads or tails of the story. The bad thing is, this also appears in the explanation of the game mechanics. I legitimately tried to reread multiple game tips and couldn’t piece together what they were trying to say. This left me both confused and not thoroughly able to play the game to its full potential.

It didn’t really matter that much, since the game play is clunky, unresponsive, and downright bad. It’s a cover-based shooter. That means going cover to cover popping off shots at enemies. Sounds easy enough, only the cover is questionable at best since I’m never guaranteed that my character will stay in cover, the aiming is completely off with or without the auto aim on, and enemies seem to take forever to go down while still being able to hit me while in cover. There’s even a “roadie run” ability that is mapped to pushing in the left analog stick of all places.
Each character has a special ability that I think I used once or twice each time.

These are supposed to help the player when in a pinch, but never seemed to actually do much of anything. One character has a slow down mechanic that disoriented me more than anything, and by the time I got my bearings, the slow down was over. Another character has a force field shield that is supposed to allow him to take more damage before dying, but I died just as fast all the same, and the last character has an automotive turret that can be deployed, but every time I used it, it would either do nothing or miss practically every shot.

Players can upgrade each character and their weapons using skill points they acquire throughout the campaign. These actually felt like they were doing something rather than some arbitrary thing like the rest of the game. There is no co-op online or local and no multiplayer, which is probably a good thing since this game would more than likely have no one playing it. It’s just a bad game overall.

Graphically, the game is really lacking. There are some rather low resolution environments, really bad slow down during even non-combat situations, and an almost constant stutter just when moving around.

Gene Rain is one of those games that has the potential of having the “it’s so bad, it’s good” stamp on it, but actually playing the game is a frustrating chore that many will turn off after about 30 minutes. On top of that, they’re asking 30 bucks for it, which is about as laughable as the game’s voiced dialog. If this was maybe a 10 dollar game, I would say bad game fans could find some fun out of Mystery Science Theater 3000’ing it, but no way should anyone spend as much as they’re asking for it now. It’s confusing, boring, frustrating, and not worth your time and money.

Fun Tidbit: You want to play an Asian developed 3rd person shooter that is actually good? Check out Binary Domain.

Review copy of game provided by publisher.