Alpha Omega is...where to start?

My immediate reaction on first flicking through the core rulebook was one of "it's trying too hard to be shadowrun". And at a first glance, the comparrison is indeed inevitable - the setting can easily be mistaken for Shadowrun on steroids, but in fact if you look past that, there's so much more here. You've got huge levels of character customisation ranging from regular humans through genetically engineered clones and mutants to AI and beyond. There are also more customisation options, weapons, genetic defects, cybernetic implant and gneerally goodness than you can shake a stick at.

The game itself is an interesting mixed bag. The basic mechanics use a dice pool system involving pretty much every polyhedral dice in the set, including d4s (I personally find the idea of a caltrop dicepool a tad unwieldy) and seems to be attempting to cover every possible base. And this is where my main grudge comes in: Alpha Omega seems to try too hard. There are thirteen possible stances your character can be taking in combat, and whilst I can just about see why rules for treading water can be useful, I do have to ask how often the average player is going to want to "monkey run" (defined as shuffling using two feet and one hand). Indeed the number of tables to be tracked for "character state" alone is a headache for those who, like myself, are not brilliantly keen on book keeping. And as for weapons... you name it, you can have it. It even has chainswords - both single and double handed! Close combat weapons and ranged weapons both range from mundane to ridiculosuly overpowere, and thanks to the wide range of abyonets and spiky bits avvailable, both can be combined into one really nasty death dealing contraption.

Yes, Alpha Omega tries too hard. But on the other hand, we're talking about a game here which contains more stuff in its core rulebook than most games would put in several sourcebooks. It's worth every single penny you pay for it. And it's honestly worth looking into for the setting alone - the setting which takes up most of the first quarter of the book. Alpha Omega is ridiculosuly OTT postcyberpunk, and what more can you ask of it?