Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 08:48 am
Galaxy Genome – Simulation Game Review
Galaxy Genome is a Simulation/Adventure game from Anton Skvortsov, first launched in 16th May 2021.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 104+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Galaxy Genome Stand Out
Galaxy Genome is an open world sci-fi space simulator.
You'll be able to upgrade your ship and customize every component as you hunt, explore, fight, mine, smuggle, trade and survive in the cutthroat galaxy. Follow the main story or do side missions.
This game gives you the ability to feel real space exploration. The entirety of the Milky Way re-created at its full galactic proportions.
At the beginning of the game you are a pilot of a small ship. Financial struggle forces you to start transporting contraband. Certainly, it will lead to you being in trouble with the law someday. But at some point in your life you are forced to make a deal with the authorities of the system. And that is when your dangerous space adventure begins.
Game Features:
- Free-form play allows everyone to choose their own path, becoming an angry pirate, a peaceful trader, an explorer, a bounty hunter, or a mix between these roles.
- More than 30 different and customizable ships.
- The game has a vibrant story and side quests.
- Surface vehicles to explore planets.
- No classes or skill levels, strength is decided by ship equipment and player skill.
- The vast 1:1 scale Milky Way galaxy is based on real scientific principles. Around 2 billion star systems.
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Galaxy Genome is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 11th October 2024
Recent improvements include:
- Bug fixes
Download & Availability
Galaxy Genome is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Get Galaxy Genome on App Store
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
Best space sim on ios hands down. Required a lot of trial and error before figuring out how stuff works but very rewarding once you know your way around CREATOR REQUEST please add save extraction for save editing or money cheats, stuck at like 110M in a Valkyrie and dont have it in us more to grind 500+ for a full upgraded Nemesis.
There we were scrolling through the app store and seeing nothing but pay-to-play garbage and Im thinking, The phone Im holding has more power than our first gaming console. There have to be better options. After a little digging, we found Galaxy Genome, and yes, we finally found an iphone game that gives the old NES library a run for its money. Its not perfect, a little buggy in places, but it is light second ahead of what you usually find on the App Store. Its basically a 2D Elite Dangerous but with better story, better progression, and better art. If you love space sim rpgs, this ones well worth the price.
Definitely worth a try if you have a bit of disposable time. Ive got about 20 hours clocked in the game so far and we still feel like we have so much left to do.
This game borrows a good amount from Elite Dangerous and even a bit from the old Space Pirate game (that was around ages ago, which was really a space trading game). While its a top-down 2D title, its well laid out, has a solid amount of missions, several flushed-out game loops, and a primary mission/storyline to undertake. And, perhaps best of all, the games creator is active on Discord and Reddit and does take into consideration what people ask or suggest. It may not be everyones cup of tea, but then again, neither is Elite Dangerous. But for those looking for an engaging space trading, combat and missioning sandbox with a story set within it, its an excellent game.
Really solid game 5/5. If you played Elite Dangerous then you will love this mobile take on the same style, discord is active and has a decent community supporting the game! Hoping for more BIG updates soon.
Otherwise, its a great game to unwind and play.
We played for a bit then switched to fallout shelter for daily stuff and it had no sound. The only game that has sound is this one. So ya .. Is there a fix for this.
We wouldve preferred this as an email to the developer but since no contact information is listed, we have to do it this way. Mostly this feels like a puzzle game to us because of the lack of necessary information to accomplish things. It reminds us of Endless Sky in this regard especially, and the 2D environment feels similar. There should be a wiki that explains trade, combat, exploration, etc.: and in-depth! Not just the broad, generic overview under the information tab which is almost worthless if one needs information on how to actually play the game. As it is, we spend more time trying to figure out how to complete a storyline mission than actually playing the game. Aside from the self-explanatory freight or courier missions listed, theres zero information about the station needs or donation ones, so we just ignore them now since they apparently only exist to destroy our reputation. We mean it looks like its probably a great game and we mostly like it. But better information from developer would be appreciated.
Sometimes Chinese characters turn into blocks.
This game has so much potential but it just takes to long to do things! Im all about grinding but thats not what makes up the bulk of the time in this game its mostly just watching your ship move through large spaces to different stations or multiple warps and it just too much time of nothing.
Love placing the game have played it for 24 hours so far and its great but we noticed a few time that the story line quests juts kinda freeze and you can never go any further this happens with both main and side quest pls fix and continue to update and make your game better thank you.
How long will you guys keep updating this game? Please try to add co op or something or let us get a huge fleet thanks.
Is there a way to see how many total light years we have traveled while playing.
Got ourselves stuck with low fuel, unable to warp, and no stations in the system, while carrying a tourist to Beta Circini, because we thought we had installed a fuel scoop on this ship. Now Im stranded and its our own fault. Superb game.
Could you please enable reverse landscape mode.
We like the game, but it has a crashing issue everytime we hit the mission button on the ship, im using a iphone 15 if it helps.
Like a 2D elite dangerous, but not in a good way. This is more of a hardcore simulation despite being a 2D isometric game that would have been better suited for a more arcade type gameplay. The good parts of the game is that there an incredibly expansive universe to explore and incredible number of customization options to fine tune your ship, and create your own fleet. What turned us off is the horrible flight controls the the tedious amount of time it takes for navigating a star system. Other issues is a lack of an index to explain stat terms like optimal mass which makes us wonder if Im upgrading our ship the right way. Trading is also too inefficient to be a viable way to make money in game.
It incorporates. Theres so much to do. The main quest is to shortit seems. But the game is sooo good… The space travel, physics, intricacy of every ship, the controls… It has glitches but the gameplay isnt like nything ive played and easily stil 10 out of 10. Tjhings its could improve: incorporating the mystery of space travel like the original "out there".
We love it. You are a genius creator. How come the mining laser cant do damage to ships.
Have just downloaded this game and am enjoying it. Its great to see a quality game without in app purchases taking place in space.
Im receiving a message that the our karma is too big, and it should be less or equal to liked in order to start the main storyline. The same happens on some other stations trying to pick a mission.
Been looking for a space faring sim in this style for a long time, and this hits all the marks. Trading, missions, exploration, mining, combat you can play the game however is fun. There are so many space arcade shooters, and games like eve echoes could scratch this itch but it has typical eve pay/time gating. Cant recommend highly enough and hope more people come across this gem.
We really am enjoying this game. We understand a game like this might not be for everybody, but every once in a while it is great to find a game which is not an online multiplayer pvp spend-a-thon. We love that this is a game we can play for 15 minutes or 2 hours when we want and not when timers are coming due. This game features a nice progression of ships, some good quests and side features like upgrades through engineers. With that said we do have a few suggestions – some of which may already be in the developers plans: 1. More engineers – currently you cant get upgrades to all of the weapons, many optional ship sections or any of the external ship features. It would be great to have that. Also engineers can only boost your ship parts so much, could engineers further away do more in the future which would allow players to continue to improve their ships? 2. Upgrade options for more of the optional or external ship parts. Could better spectral analyzers allow you to see info on plants or the system with out having to move around the system. Or could better chaff launchers have more uses.. 3. The ability to name systems, stars and planets. Many of the already discovered systems have planet and star names, but the undiscovered stuff doesnt. We think it would make the exploration aspect of the game better if players could name things as they explored. After all since this is a solo play game every players universe is their own, why not let them name it. 4. Some type of easy reference method to see what minerals are available in a system once it has been visited. Maybe the galaxy map could have an option for more info on systems that have been visited, and it would display how many of which type of planets, what ore is on them as well as the ore available in the asteroid fields. This would prevent a lot of repeated wandering blindly until minerals were found to fulfill tasks. 5. Make the keyboard standard.. Please it is so awkward to use the keyboard when putting in bookmarks on the map. Dont get us wrong – we really enjoy this game, and am looking forward to coninueing to play it – we just would like to see it reach the potential we think it has. 6. Lastly – some way in the galaxy map to determine which stars have been explored, maybe some type of overlay with green, yellow and red for if a system has been fully explored, partially or not at all. This would make large exploration missions easier to plot out.
Theres not much else like this game on iOS, so thats good. EV-like space sim – trade, combat, etc. That said, there are quite a few frustrating issues that make it difficult to fully enjoy the game: 1. Crashes – something as simple as opening the mission menu can completely crash the game. When auto-saves can be more than five minutes apart, losing your progress can be very frustrating. There also doesnt seem to be any de-spawn timer for debris, so if you stay in one system for too long, the junk from destroyed ships will eventually crash the app. 2. Controls – the only way to manually control your ship using touch controls is to point in the direction you want to go. The ship will accomplish this by firing off-axis thrusters, making the motion very unintuitive. Its also impossible to manually fire retro-thrusters despite the auto-pilot being able to use them. Having a relative-style yaw + forward/back would be much more intuitive. 3. Routing – the game lets you plot a course between multiple systems, but it often does so non-optimally or even fails altogether, even if its clearly possible. We think this is due to improper use of euclidean distance optimization in the pathfinding algorithm. Sometimes your first jump needs to leave you farther from your destination in order to actually make it there. 4. Search – much of the game involves traveling to systems with names like LHS-123 or RZQ-456. There is a search function, but it only returns one result and is sensitive to capitalization. So you have to type the system exactly as written or youre likely to find a completely random one. Theres also zero map indication of current mission targets, and also no way to quick link from mission system names to the galaxy map. Simple QOL improvements like this would make a huge difference. 5. Mission Variety – not sure if its just the early game, but almost every mainline mission seems to simply be travel to this system, kill this ship. There isnt a whole lot of variety.
Overall the game has a lot of features – combat, trading, missions, exploration, systems/power management, mining, ship upgrades, and a lot more. It's like playing a 2D, slower paced Galaxy on Fire (but without the voiceover acting and AAA quality graphics). If you're into that kind of game, then it can be a lot of fun. There's a decent amount of help/info provided, but there could definitely be more to explain the details of ship modules and other similar details throughout the game. For example, the warp modules don't seem to indicate how far each one will take you – so if we can't reach a certain star system without upgrading our warp module, how do we know how much of an upgrade we need?? And the labels for all the module levels (ex. 2A, 3C, 5E, etc) really aren't very helpful and can be downright confusing, such as when a 3A is better than a 2C, but a 2A is better than a 3E. A more meaningful naming system is desperately needed. On a related note, if you load up your ship with lots of modules and suddenly find you can no longer warp to systems you used to be able to warp to, the alert doesn't tell you that your ship is too loaded down – instead it simply says your warp module isn't good enough. So how are you supposed to know that adding those modules caused the problem? When we first saw that, we thought it was a bug! Speaking of bugs, there are a few. For one, if you turn off (uncheck the box) a module on your ship, suddenly the module list can't be scrolled. Also there are seeming inconsistencies. When comparing some of the ships, there are huge price differences when the ship features seem VERY similar. For example, the Pangolin and Phoenix – nearly 200k difference in price, but the only real difference in features we see are the more expensive Phoenix has two extra external module sockets but three fewer optional module sockets (and it's highest class of those is 3, compared to 4 (which we think is better?) on the cheaper Pangolin, which also comes with an extra optional module). That doesn't seem like a tradeoff worth 200k?? Other oddities include courier tasks that pay a fraction of any other task (so why would we ever want to do a courier task that pays 10k and only 1 more in reputation when we can do a transfer task that pays 80k?), the first main mission (after finishing the tutorial missions) that tells you to go a system that is way out of your ship's range, the fact that you can have any number of collecting drones but only one drone controlling module (you have to get higher level versions to control more drones, but why? Why shouldn't we be able to have multiple drone controlling modules?), and more. The good thing is the dev is still working on the game, fixing bugs and adding features.
Very much enjoying the game. We do see potential for it to become a grind doing the same things over and over but right now it is easy to play for hours and not care. It is crashing on us constantly though which just gets frustrating repeating the same mission or having to re-plot courses, find stations again, refight battles, etc. Clicking on the mission menu seems to be the most common crash, which just makes it even more frustrating. Our rating would increase significantly should that be fixed.
We are very interested to see where this game goes but right now we cant play in landscape mode on our iPad Pro. When we do it freezes right as the loading bar fills. We can hear things in the background but cannot play it like this.
This is really a fantastic sandbox space game adapted very well for mobile. As others have written, it's similar in scope to Elite. There is no multiplayer which actually helps keep the game reasonably sane. We get vibes of legendary PC DOS games like starflight and even Trek. This is definitely a diamond in the rough and we hope we see continued refinements and expansion on the core game. There's so much to do and the pace of the game feels right to us. Not too crazy but not completely slow. Fast traveling is a help and you always have a min to plot your travel and explore.
We thought the game was glitching due to mission rewards but we soon was told by dev. It was due to our fleet. With that being said and proven correct 5 mf STARS baby. Im on our way to nemesis and mapping out the entire galaxy! Challenge accepted.
Ive been looking for a game like this for sooooooo long.
Would like to know if we will be able to use backbone controller in game.
So far we are very much enjoying this game. We love that the developers took inspiration from Elite Dangerous and other AAA space games and brought it to a mobile format. The learning curve is a bit steep with very little hand holding, but there are tutorials available to help you in whatever path you choose. Ambient sounds are great, and there are lots of options to optimize for your hardware and tastes. We will be diving deep into this hidden gem, and look forward to updating this review as we progress. O7.
Phenomenal gamesalute to the developer, we need more like you around.
The game seems like it could be a lot of fun, but its just not responding to our Xbox Series X controllers. Ive tried two. One major reason that we purchased this game because it said it would support it and, while the settings appear to know its connected, the actual game play doesnt respond at all to it.
If you play Elite Dangerous this game is incredible because it really is a mobile version of Elite. Our compliments to the developer. This is an Incredible feat that should be supported. We have been playing this game non stop after we purchased it, thanks o7.
Absolute fantastic job, we dont think theres anything else like it on the Apple market so you have things cornered. We were wondering if you could add the ability to customize the on screen display controls a little bit more, so that we can add a flight assist on and off shortcut button near the shooter stick. In general a little better control customization would be great, like auto hide on the analog sticks when not touching the screen, and the option to remove the borers around the control zones around both sticks so there is more immersion. Thank you very much for your time making this sim. Its appreciated and enjoyable.
Elite Dangerous in your pocket. Seems to be getting updates still. Amazing.
All the great parts of E:D, without Frontier around to ruin everything. Fantastic job on this game; itll eat so many hours of our life.
Like a full fledged procedurally generated space game, similar to Elite Dangerous, this app has an innumerable number of stars to explore, each with their own number of planets.
Reminds us of an old Apple iie game, love the nostalgic feel and its a lot of fun. Great job with this one.
This game needs good controller support, but the bones of an iOS classic are all here. Wonderful.
We really want to like this game, but the tutorial really doesnt help too much. Ive spent a couple hours trying to figure out what to do and when we follow the first few missions to get started we find Im always the target of high level ships that destroy our ship and everything Im transporting. If you like wasting time doing the same thing over and over the start of this game is exactly that. Very difficult to get started. Update: we have now out in about 5 hours. The first 2-3 hours were definitely a struggle with the learning curve being fairly steep. After trying a variety of things in the game and just spending time trying to figure it out we think Ive finally got some of it down. While we feel the in game tutorial really did not help us much, now that Ive gotten a handle on the basics it is VERY fun. Was tough for us to get started but now Im enjoying the actual gameplay figuring out how the game goes.
After a couple of hours we still dont have a clue what we are supposed to do. We might be able to take some cargo (and never find a station that would buy it) and run a couple of 10000/3 rep transport missions. Then a super high level enemy kills us, we lose our cargo we never managed to sell and all the reputation we have gained. This might be an elitesque gem but there does not seem to be a restore saved game possibility to allow trying something again. Just lose everything and start again from zero. Done that a few times now and it becomes so repetitive we find it more and more difficult to even bother. What should we do? Keep grinding the $10k missions ad nauseam until we can buy a $500k ship that could fit in good enough equipment to take us to the first story point far far away in the anarchy zone? No idea. The sheer inability to make any progress whatsoever might just not be our cup of tea. Hence three stars.
Game looks like its fun, but unfortunately its extremely glitchy. Have had to restart the app a few times, but after the last time ALL of our saves show play time: 0:00:00, and trying to load one leads to a permanent black screen. Save was during the you smuggled goods and now you need to do us a favor story mission.
For the time Ive put in, we cant stop smiling. This to us feels like a 2d Elite Dangerous. There is some small design choices Im still trying to wrap our head around but nothing so far that has us feeling frustrated. If your looking for a game on mobile like Elite Dangerous and can get past the 2d graphics, then you should absolutely give this game a try. We can see putting in hundreds if not thousands of hours into this, and its only 3 bucks.
Just awesome. Been waiting a long time for a game like this and we could see ourselves sinking many hours into it. The soothing music is perfect and gives us No Mans Sky vibes. We understand why the starter ship is so basic so we cant wait wait to unlock a better ship or improve the starter one. The modules and power priority is a little confusing but hopefully either we figure it out or its not imperative that every setting has to be tinkered with. It would be neat if when you earn XP it goes to a role/job. Could rise ranks and become a famous bounty hunter, expert miner, trader, explorer, etc. Would just be a cool title to have and see how far youve come. As it is though, this is an absolutely great game and we hope more people discover and enjoy this.
We know were starting the game with a beginners ship but the turning speed and decel/accel are absolutely terrible, we keep flying by everything because we cant slow down, even with autopilot it always blows by the destination. Please fix this and itll be five star for sure, great start though Ive been looking for a game like this for a while. Also maybe add disabling of ships with a chance boarding and taking over the ship as your own, going back to escape velocity if you know of this game, it had that function and we loved it. Another function would be later in the game the ability to battle a station to take control and earn credits from it over time. Adding rare ships and weapons would be sweet too, like we said just some suggestions to make this game over the top.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 1.6.5
- Size: 112.31 MB
- iOS: 13.4 or later
- Languages: EN, PT, RU, ZH, ZH
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: [Anton Skvortsov]()
Last updated: 11th October 2024 | Genre: Simulation, Adventure | Developer: Anton Skvortsov