So I imagine a lot of you have probaly heard the jokes about how, in Star Trek, apparently the various captians cant deligate a single fucking job and have to do everything they're bloody self. Thats sort of how it feels playing Genesis Alpha One.
So the plot is that in the future, earths fucked and varoius corporations have sent out colony ships of cloned humans to go find a new planet to ruin. You take the role of the captain of one such vessel of your choice, or rather a procession of captians as the title passes to another crew member if the one you're currently inhabiting gets killed. Your ship is almost fully customisable, the layout is completly designed by the player, a feature I personaly enjoy as I find it helps you feel invested in a game, if it gives you the feeling that something in it actualy belongs and is enique to you.
The actual gameplay revolves around trying to upgrade your ship by adding on modules from the bridge such as the tractor beam thats used to salvage resources like frameworks and panel from wreckages found in space. I like to imagine that theyre the remnants of youre prevoius expeditions, as GAO is a roguelike. You can select certain "artifacts" from previous failed or successful mission like weapons, upgrades for your suit, ship modules or the locations of resources and alien species. Different corporations can start with a different amount of artifacts and also a different style or size of modules. For example the Stahl Union Corp has a massive deposit module thats filled with what you collect from the hanger, that you use to launch your harvester ship from, to gather resources from planets, like iron or aluminium, that can be refined in the refinary (obviosly) into more frameworks and panels.
The different corporations do offer slightly different setups ,for example General Balistics starts with better weaponry, probably obvious by the name. Superor Genetics, is the best for your the cloning of your crew. You can splice your clones DNA with the DNA of the aliens you've in inavaded the space or planets of and wantonly slaughtered, and make a crew of whats needed for the atmoshere of the planet you want to use for the genesis project.
Though if your wanting to talk tips and tricks, find a planet thats compatable with O2 and clone enough humans or arachnoids that you can settle that planet than rinse and repeat. Also stick with just the tractor beam for as long as you can and explore the maintenace tunnels of your ship after you do bloody anything.
As stated before, the main issue I find with GAO is that you have to do almost everything yourself. If you send your crew alone to mine a planet then at least one of them is definetly going to get killed by one of those bloody worm things because it had the utterly brilliant stratagy of cralwing right up to them. You also have to oversee the tractor beam incase they get murdered by aliens they accidenly beam in. Oversee the refinary incase anything pops out of the box of resources and murders them, and explore the maintenance tunnels of the ship to clean out any alien eggs or toxic spores that they will happily stand in until a plant monster jumps out of it and murders them. Am I supposed to be the captian of this ship or the fucking Janitor.
All in all, I admit I've enjoyed my time with GAO, its janky and could do with an overhaul in the AI department but if you thinkn you'd enjoy building you own spaceship to go and ravage random planets for all there resources this is the game for you.