Previous Next

The career of Steve Bak, the programmer of Return To Genesis, seems to be a bit like that of Orson Wells. I'm not saying that he should be doing sherry commercials, just that all his good work seems to have been at the start of his career, and since then he's just hacking it out with little regard for originality.

Return To Genesis is a "Defender" derivative, with the added bonus of the fashionable "extra weapon" features. Like Bak's first ST game, Goldrunner, it's distinguished by excellent scrolling, colourful design by Pete Lyon, sophisticated music by David Whittaker and sampled speech. The follow-up to Goldrunner, Jupiter Probe, was a rather slow and dull vertical scroller, the most annoying aspect of which was the small size of the playing area. Return To Genesis has the same fault; the actual playing area occupies only the central third of the screen, so there's not much room to manoeuvre.

There are two ways to play Genesis; you can race through the ten beautifully-detailed backgrounds, blasting madly and bouncing harmlessly off the surface details, or you can take it slowly and carefully, manoeuvring around the obstacles and picking up the little space-suited scientists who are the object of your quest.

You have to be careful not to zap these, because they will supply you with extra weapons such as shields, multi-blasters and speed-ups. After picking up a scientist, you can pause the game using the Help key, examine the nicely-drawn portraits of the brains on board, and select one to help crew your ship.

Clues to the weapons they can provide are given in the accompanying booklet, but not all will be of help on every stage.

More reliable is the scanner at the bottom of the screen. This shows obstacles in black, scientists as red dots, enemies as white dots and your ship as a white square. It took me some time to figure out that the map wraps around; you don't have to fly left to right - if you like, you can fly right to left and tackle the difficult end of each level first. You can also try flying backwards to defend your back!

Technically, Return To Genesis is superb. I particularly like the way in which your ship and your enemies can fly through and under some of the constructions, although this makes it hard to keep track of some of the baddies! The most annoying thing about them is that they normally attack you from behind, forcing you to execute a smart flip to attack them. This tends to slow down the action, which is never a good idea for an arcade game.

Control is by mouse, joystick or keyboard. Mouse control offers some advantages, but since you can use any control at any time, you could easily swap to joystick for the tricky bits, fighting on until all the scientists are rescued or killed.

The loading screen, showing a cyborg space pilot, is wonderful, and it's a pity that picture wasn't used on the rather undistinguished packaging. The speech samples are clear - "Return To Genesis", "World Cleared", and so on - but sound as if someone is bored with the whole business. I, for one, would tend to agree; Return To Genesis is a pot-boiler which doesn't really improve on any of the myriad of shoot-'em-ups for the Atari ST.