Genesis

It was an epic, once in a life-time battle - the kind children will whisper about among their friends in the centuries to come.

With every sinew of my being working in tandem with my desire to actually review this game before Christmas, I clawed my way through the nearly two-hour long tutorial for Genesis.

Knowing the meat of this sub-StarCraft online real-time strategy game would involve fighting real people, it seemed prudent to be schooled in the basics.

But when the basics are the same ones RTS players have been stuck with since Dune II - resource-management, tech tree, base rushing - the game's habit of dragging out each and every one into an agonising, interactive hand-holding exercise is nearly soul-destroying.

Ported from a hit South Korean browser game, this generic fantasy world features three warring races (mediaeval-looking Humans, hideous alien-like Demons, and the dragon-loving Noahs), which are fighting ceaselessly for control of a rather featureless planet.

As the tutorial teaches you in painstaking fashion, your goal in each battle - whether head-head-head or three-on-three - is to use workers to gather enough ore and mana resources to build an army.

Everything from selecting units to navigating the mini-map is tap-controlled, and, while the chunky icons and units (everything looks quite 16-bit) and zoomable play screen are well-tuned for mobile play, the buttons are unresponsive and often need repeated jabs to work.

Once you've got some barracks and a training camp, however, you can start knocking out more powerful troops and researching powers like shield defence to deploy in combat and tower defence-esque turrets to fend off invaders.

It's rare to get this far, mind, as no matter how snappy I got at setting up a bustling little empire the higher ranked players I was invariably matched with would storm my base within minutes and wipe out every trace of my existence.

Only in the rarely occurring three-on-three matches did I get a chance to catch my breath and tinker with the tech trees and the different skills I could bestow on warriors.

Still, even with some eventual victories under my belt, it was impossible to ignore the fact that Genesis feels unbalanced, tedious (starting your near-identical base from scratch every time is time-sapping chore), and entirely without the compulsiveness of the StarCraft-alikes it aims to replicate.