A prototype build of this game was sent to me several years ago, though I hadn’t a strong enough to rig to run it. I do now however, so I decided to check out the full version of the game, along with all of it’s patches and whatnot. For those of you who are unaware, Evil Genome is a metroidvania title with a 2.5D graphic style that looks almost exactly the same as what was used much more recently in Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night. The only difference here is, Eternal Genome was made by a small team of Chinese developers, which is one of the reasons that I think people may have passed on it. It was also a Kickstarter title and had a few professional voice actors, all in English of course. I believe that the voice actress for cyber-suited heroine Lachesis actually had a chance to rework her script, but Adolf’s voice actor decided for some unknown reason to just read the lines as they were given, which seems pretty damn lazy to me. Sure, it’s a Chinese title but having your voice in the game should at least come with modifications to the script regarding basic fucking English. It is obvious that the developers do not speak English very well, as you will find with a lot of Chinese in general; so if I was asked to perform lines or even paid to perform them, I would have asked to not only see my script, but to be able to amend and fix common grammar issues within it. My guess is that he was not paid very much for the job and didn’t really care. That being said, it will reflect pretty heavily here. Maybe I’ll get some kind of hate mail after posting this from the guy, asking me to let this game be buried in the wastelands of Steam and to never speak about it. But I won’t do that.
Why? Because I thought the final build of Evil Genome was a very well made and interesting little game. We begin on the surface of an unknown world, fighting giant bugs and other sorts of things that might live within these caverns. Lachesis uses both physical attacks and guns, which can all be upgraded along with various (and quite useful skills) which help a great deal towards the end of it. Additionally, if you go back to your ship around a third of the way through the game when given a chance, you’ll pick up two different types of summer clothing outfits, one which is more revealing and the other which is a bit more conservative. You know, just in case you didn’t want her to run through the caverns in her cyber-suit the whole time. Additionally, there are different types of regular enemies with not only their own distinct attack patterns, but their own special moves. We’ve all fought spiders before, but there are different types of spiders in this game for example, that keep things interesting. You also want to fight as much as you can for experience and gold of course, which is useful in buying health injections (which you can equip to a single button slot) new armor, weapons and just plain upgrading the things you have. There’s actually quite a bit you can do, even though you don’t necessarily find a lot of items. It isn’t that kind of metroidvania, even though you do eventually get the double jump ability as well as some others that will allow you to reach places that you normally couldn’t before.
Bosses can range from amazingly detailed tremors and robot monkeys, all of the way to skilled assassins and even a giant laser cannon. There are even some mini-bosses that take a while to dispatch and you’ll soon realize who they are when you’ve heard the floating iron egg (and narrator for the mission) tell you that your health is low. That’s another thing, the voice of the floating iron egg (that’s what I’m going to call it too) is also surprisingly well done and utilizes a great English script with no Engrish, unlike a few that I’ve detailed further. Apparently, some voice actors just did not care – and frankly, the game is worse off for it. There are also some story line bits that are in Engrish and need some simple editing work. Once you leave the caverns, you soon find yourself in the middle of a great war. The game also allows you to play on both sides of that war before finding a third side and ultimately the rushed final boss. The game progressed through quite fine until about the point where you’re on the side of the enemies that you had been previously fighting. The difficulty ramps up quite a bit, especially when you fight the strongest enemies in the game towards the very end, which are almost like bosses in themselves. You see, some enemies have such a detailed AI that it gets a bit frustrating and I’ll admit that I spent a lot of time working with Cheat Engine on this one, because it just wasn’t happening the old fashioned way. But before you jump to conclusions, realize that I completed at least 80% of the game before even jumping to this point. I had already uncovered one of many possible alludes to Lachesis’s true nature and even battled her former ship. I felt that the game became too difficult far too quickly and that player could not have been as strong as they needed to be in order to finish the last part of the game without throwing their controller out the window. I daresay that the last part of this game became a bit too difficult for my taste, but it felt on par with what Bloodstained: Ritual Of The Night was offering with it’s bizarre lack of save points in the castle? Or perhaps I missed something there. In any case, Lachesis does eventually become a bit of a bad ass and can even summon several clones of herself to fight the enemies along with her ability to eventually become a one-woman army. She eventually becomes a Swiss army knife of weapons and abilities, even still not powerful enough to take on the kinds of enemies that the developers threw at me. I’m serious folks, by the end of the game Lachesis had abilities that would make Samus blush and even Alfa… I mean, “iron egg” gained a few abilities in the process. Problem is, you later run into tank enemies that can heal nuisance enemies and that sort of thing, so it drives you a bit mad. However, if you’re on good terms with one or more of the factions in this war, their people will stop attacking you. That is one benefit. And no, you can’t just attack them for the hell of it because you feel that they deserve some kind of vengeance for making your life a living hell for the past hour.
I need to reiterate that the tremor battle is overlooked. At least watch it on YouTube, because the design of that boss and the overall threat of it was just something I hadn’t expected. I was like, “holy shit, that thing is big – don’t tell me I gotta fight it!” which was exactly the case. It wasn’t that difficult to fight however, very few of the bosses are until you get to the two cyber-suited lesbian twins (come on gals, you’re not fooling anyone here) which are beyond overpowered. That was also the area where I decided it was time for a bit of cheating. Cheaters never win, except when the programmers don’t realize how tough they’re making things and even a sensible gamer realizes that there’s no way to finish the battle with skill alone. I’ve read several complaints about the lesbian twins and they are definitely a problem that needed to be nerfed several years ago. Maybe that’s why people simply forgot about Lachesis. As for the music in the game, I found it to be quite suitable as we get a mixture of desert atmospheres as well as more rustic and industrial tones when it comes to fighting enemies. I believe there are even some heavy metal cuts during a few of the boss fights in the game, which I certainly won’t complain about.
Overall, I was more than pleased with over half of this game and would still recommend it, at least up until the battle with the twins. If you can beat them, great. Though myself and a lot of other people have had trouble and again – they need to be nerfed. If you’re looking for something to fill that Bloodstained shaped hole in your heart right now, then I ask that you consider Evil Genome. I know that Chinese games get a bad rap, but this one really impressed me and I hope that maybe the developers will jump back into it and fix some things. But who am I kidding? The project is pretty much abandoned and I might be one of the few people who actually enjoyed it.
