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Created By: Relic
Published By: Sierra

Quick Look

A beautiful, well crafted real-time strategy game set in space, Homeworld follows a story of a race searching for their origins through 16 widely varied missions. With a wonderful in game tutorial and a comprehensive manual, this game is a must have for anyone who enjoys strategy games.

Story

You play as one of two races, both sharing the same basic plot: you have just discovered hyper-space technology. You have a rough knowledge of the location of your home world, and you decide to set out in search of it. Needless to say, the first test of hyper-space technology does not go as planned, and your goals turn from discovery to survival. The story is told through two different but equally effective methods: in between missions black and white movies set major mission goals and tell of major events, while in-mission events are rendered in the games engine, leading to a wonderful sense of continuity within each mission.

Game Play

We are all familiar with the two dimensional RTS games, and some of the methods they use to differentiate units. Firing range, movement speed and weapon type are all popular variables that help make 2D units unique. Flame thrower decimate infantry, but do little against heavy armor while tank cannons are great against armor but do little against infantry. Positioning your artillery on a ledge to prevent tanks from swarming it is a great idea, but how do you execute a similar maneuver in the emptiness of space? Relic has done an excellent job in differentiating their units through 4 variables: ship movement rate, ship turn rate, turret range and turret movement rate. These allow for very interesting ships that all serve a purpose.

Here are some examples: fighters are very quick ships with high turning rates, but feature only front-facing guns with very little turret range. This means that fighters are very nimble and adept at avoiding fire, but they can only attack a ship while flying straight at it. Corvettes, on the other hand, are slower, but have multiple turrets with a wide pivot range and a quick movement rate. Capital ships are slow, very slow, and their turrets often rotate slowly, if at all, making them easy prey for swarms of fighter but very capable of disposing of corvettes. Similarly, corvettes can bring down fighters with ease, but they fall prey to the powerful guns of Capital ships. There are, of course, some exceptions, such as the Ion Cannon Frigate, which has a single powerful gun that only fires straight ahead. This frigate can take down opposing capital ships easily, but couldn’t kill a single fighter if it had to.

The main effect of this method is that there is no one ship that will win the game for you, nor a single combination of ships that will win every game for you. You need to build according to your goals and your opponent’s fleet. This lends a refreshing uniqueness to every multi-player game, and adds the challenge of keeping your fleet flexible in the single player game. Also important are formations, and if you’ve played Myth you’ll feel right at home. The type and number of ships, as well as their current mission, dictate the most effective formation to use. Capital ships are almost always best in a wall formation, but sometimes should be in a sphere formation, especially if attacking or defending a single large target. Fighters are a much more complex matter, and effective use of the formations will often turn the tide of any battle with fighters involved. The claw formation is the best one for up to 20 fighters, but more than 20 fighters and the outer ships will not be able to fire on the target. Switching to the tighter packed delta or wall formations may be necessary, or they may cost you a lot of your ships, as they have less room to maneuver.

Graphics

Homeworld is a gorgeous game, and the first game I have ever played that truly conveys the emptiness and beauty of space. Distant suns and nebulae pierce the blackness, and in some missions you are in the nebulae, flying through brilliant multi-color swirls.

The true strength of this game, though, is the ship design. Ships are superbly detailed up close, with all the little fins and guns that you would expect on any respectable space-faring vessel. As you zoom out, the finer details disappear, but the overall shape of the ship is easily recognizable, even when fully zoomed out. Even if Homeworld were a horrible game, I would applaud it for the speed of the engine (I run it at 1024×768 with a celeron 466, 128 meg ram, and a G400 MAX, and it can scale up to 1600×1200, which gets a little choppy for me in large battles), and the true scale of the ships. A Frigate dwarfs a fighter, while a heavy cruiser dwarfs the frigate, and the mother ship dwarfs the heavy cruiser, making the fighter look like an insignificant speck. Fighters are cheap, though, and you’ll likely end up with over 80 of them on the screen at some point in the game. To aid in the tracking of all of these ships, Relic has added “path tails” to each of the strike craft that show where they have just been. Aside from helping you keep track of each ships heading, a swarm of fighters produces a beautiful moving canvas of these tails. Also added to help in large battles is a tactical overlay that puts a different shaped polygon around each type of ship, making your interceptors easily distinguishable from your attack bombers.

The ship deaths are also a pleasure to watch, with large ships suffering long, multi-stage explosions before one giant blast sends their pieces flying into the void.

Sound

Nothing to say, really. The sounds are all well done, as is the music soundtrack, but nothing really stands out as truly inspired or truly insipid.

Complaints

My biggest gripe is the lack of any true distinction between the races. This doesn’t hamper the multi-player game much, but it doesn’t add any re-play value to the single player game. Once you beat it with one race, no reason to play the other.

Secondly, I’d like to be able to choose targets for my ships when I pause the game. Not a major concern, but it still would be nice.

Lastly, I would love to be able to attack specific features of the larger ships. It would be great to take out the fighter construction bay of the mother ship, or the ion cannons of a large cruiser.

Wild, Wild Rumpus Rating: 9.5 outta 10

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