Geneforge 5: Overthrow

By J.D. Richardson

Oh dear. I really didn’t get on with Geneforge 5: Overthrow at all. Or maybe it didn’t get on with me. Who knows – but the divorce papers came through the other day and I said my final goodbye to it.

This is the fifth and apparently last instalment in the Geneforge series by Spiderweb Software, none of which really appeared on our radar before this unsuccessful foray into the world of Terrestria – although it clearly states on the Geneforge 5 website that no previous experience is necessary at all, as this is a self-contained story. The premise is one of high fantasy on a world at war, with several factions struggling for control. The strongest of these, it would seem, are the Shapers, magic users who can literally create life forms and objects out of thin air. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, the game itself doesn’t live up to the epic storyline it alludes to.

Looking at some info on the game and doing the relevant research beforehand, I had really started to look forward to playing Geneforge 5. The series has quite a large fan base, which was promising. So I start the game, choose what my character looks like and what his skills are, and it’s all systems go. The game is isometric in viewpoint, as you can see from the screenshots, and I start off in a mountain village where I am kept as a kind of servant with amnesia. So far, so good. Then I decide to look around, and the spell is broken as I click to move and my character trundles off at the speed of light, walking like John Wayne had just shit himself.

I laughed. A lot.

Now I’m not some graphics whore. I don’t need brilliant technology to enjoy a game – look at the screenshots for my Dwarf Fortress diary article and you will see that – but there’s just something wrong about Geneforge 5’s visual design. It really destroys what is actually an interesting concept for a RPG. Most characters hover around aimlessly at ridiculous speeds like they have just entered a club, dropped two Es and headed straight for the dance floor. Continuing the rave theme, so many characters are just coloured in one fantastically bright hue. Supposedly intimidating guards wear hot pink armour with hot pink faces and hot pink hands and legs, as entirely blue men wander around them. They might as well all have glow sticks for weapons. The concept of “epic” was hovering so far away in my subconscious that it nearly lost all meaning to me.

The other atmosphere-breakers are the environments. You start off in a mountain village, but you wouldn’t really know it if nobody had told you that. Everything is so square and uniform. Sure, the ground is white, but that’s it. When you go further down the mountain where it’s supposedly a green and pleasant land, it’s the same but with a green floor with some trees and a few twigs on the ground. Towns don’t look like towns; they just look like a random jumble of square areas with doors in them and more technicolour people than usual. I couldn’t get a sense of where I was and what the world around me was like – and that’s essential for me to be able to involve myself and invest time in a sprawling RPG like this.

Our very own Lewis Denby enjoyed playing Geneforge 5, and recently declared that it had dialogue to rival Planescape: Torment – a fact that, in continuing with the rave theme, makes me think he was also on something mind-altering at the time, judging by such an outlandish and unrestrained claim. I have to say I disagree with him wholeheartedly on this aspect. While the dialogue is better than average, it’s certainly not up there with the Black Isle classics. (I’ll hop in at this point and make a slight correction: I said it reminded me of Planescape, not that it was of the same irrefutable quality. Though I did think the writing was rather nice. -Lewis)

Combat is also a negative aspect of Geneforge 5, and when a game is as heavily loaded with scrapping as this one it makes for some rather tedious gameplay. Combat is turn-based and consists of every enemy in sight immediately rushing forwards to surround the nearest character from your party and just laying into them, and that’s it. Imagine two old men in a pub car park in their vests repeatedly taking it in turns punching each other in the face. Got that image? Right, well that’s what combat is like in Geneforge 5, only replace the old men with giant maggots and what I like to call “shit-men”: shaper constructs that look like figures moulded out of excrement. There’s no strategy involved whatsoever, apart from maybe when to use health pods. I didn’t like it. In fact, if it weren’t for the combat I would probably have enjoyed the game a lot more. I could have looked over all the other bizarre oddities that the game throws at you, as long as I didn’t have to punch old men in car parks anymore.

This has all been very negative, but lots of people love these games. Maybe you’ll be one of them. It is admirable that the Geneforge series is mainly the work of one man, but that doesn’t automatically make it a great thing. It seems like this is one of those ‘Marmite’ games, perhaps, with some people being able to overlook its flaws and get a good adventure out of it. If you can do this, then fair play to you. I wish I could.

5/10