I must admit I had little knowledge of Gene Rain prior to playing it. I had seen a few pictures, known that it was a game made in China, that it was an indie trying to emulate the feel of a AAA cover shooter… and that’s it. In theory, the game was supposed to be simple and by-the-books. It ended up being a very unforgettable experience, mostly for the wrong reasons. Gene Rain is something else.

Gene Rain is probably the worst cover shooter I’ve played in years, and without a doubt one with the least impressive production values I’ve ever seen. The term “Generic Rain” can easily be used to describe it. If you think I didn’t put that much effort into coming up with this pun, well, it’s the same amount of effort the developers put into making the game in the first place.

The graphics are terrible. Gene Rain features weak textures, an insane framerate and the cheapest assets you could imagine being thrown into it. To give you an example, the rifle used by all characters is just an enlarged version of a pistol, and it looks ridiculous. The animations are either really robotic or exaggerated to a comical degree. My character’s rolling animation looked more like he was face diving onto the concrete than an actual military evasive maneuver. I love it.

I would like to say that the gameplay is the “best” element of the game, but it’s not because it’s actually good. They are just the least terrible aspect of the game, mostly because they are basic and generic, just like other cover shooters out there. Despite this, the camera is still pretty bad, something you would expect from a game from fifteen years ago. The simple act of properly aiming at a fast-moving spider-like enemy proved to be a lot more complicated and frustrating than it should have ever been. If it serves as a positive or any consolation whatsoever, Gene Rain never crashed while I was playing it. Yay?

The real star of the show is the voice acting. Holy smokes, this is a thing of beauty. People close to me know I’m a sucker for anything that is so bad it’s good, and Gene Rain‘s voice acting is a prime example. This is “so atrocious it’s amazing”. Uninterested performances, godawful English mistakes (both in voice and written forms), amateurish sound mixing: the overall voice acting in this title makes the original Resident Evil sound like The Last of Us in comparison. I loved every second of it. I kept laughing at all times and wanted to hear more and more. Suffice to say, I stopped caring about the game’s nonsensical plot right at the beginning. I couldn’t care less about the story, I just wanted to listen to more of that sweet Sega Saturn-esque performance.

Gene Rain was a shocking experience. Even though the game never crashed nor presented any game-breaking glitches, I was astonished with its overall lack of polish: its terrible visuals, schizophrenic framerate, bad controls and overall generic gameplay. I did enjoy its voice acting and amateurish translation mistakes in a “so-terrible-it’s-awesome” kind of way, however. At the end of the day, this is a game that should be ignored by 99% of players out there. The other 1% is obviously comprised of people who have fun playing laughably bad games for kicks, just like yours truly.

 

Graphics: 2.5 Gene Rain looks as bad and generic as your typical asset flip, and its framerate is all over the place.	Gameplay: 4.5 The controls are simple and very basic, but the game suffers from bad camera controls and a terrible running command. There’s also the aforementioned framerate issue.
Sound: 5.0 Gene Rain’s voice acting is so downright abysmal, so preposterous, so absolutely horrid, I just fell in love with it. Tommy Wiseau has some serious competition.	Fun Factor: 3.0 Gene Rain, as a game itself, is bland, boring and incredibly generic. I had tons of fun laughing at its voice acting and reading tons of English mistakes, but I doubt that was intentional…
Final Verdict: 3.5

Reviewed on Xbox One.
Also available on: PS4, PC.
A copy of Gene Rain was provided by the publisher.