Homeworld 3 Single-Player Campaign Review
This review covers the single-player campaign of Homeworld 3. For thoughts on the multiplayer skirmish and War Games co-op mode, see the Homeworld 3 Multiplayer review.
Considering Homeworld 2 came out more than 20 years ago (and was remastered in 2015) it’s a welcome surprise how little had to change – and how little complexity had to be sacrificed – to bring this classic, large-scale space strategy gameplay up to modern standards and deliver a visually spectacular and mechanically varied campaign. Building and controlling an armada of strike craft, frigates, and capital ships in full 3D space is certainly a little tricker to wrap your head around than most RTS games, but thanks to the ability to pause and give orders at any time you can grow into command at your own pace. The payoff is more than worth it, and this campaign invites you to embrace your inner Admiral Akbar and walk into traps just to blast your way out.
Using a now well-worn template for soft-rebooting a series, this story follows a brand-new character who must seek out the original protagonist after they go missing – in this instance, 20 years prior. Despite that cliche, Imogen S’jet’s search for answers about what happened to Karan S’jet’s lost fleet is delivered with convincing emotion. That includes some very reasonable conflict between her and her second in command as he tries to keep her on the task of tracking down the looming new threat to Hiigara and the galaxy at large they were sent out after in the first place.
Thanks in large part to its fully animated cinematics (as opposed to the Homeworld series’ traditional hand-painted animatics), Imogen feels more human and relatable than Karan ever did, despite being hooked into the same fleet-controlling machines, wearing the same skin-tight wetsuit, and floating in another goo-filled tank with her eyes closed. But she gets to stretch her legs and emote more during the visions she has while the Mothership hyperspace jumps between missions, and that’s where we get to know her a little better. In sharp contrast to the massive scale of the city-sized Mothership flying through the wreckage of even more gargantuan megastructures, these cutscenes feel small and intimate; we only ever really see four characters, so it’s almost like watching a stage play.
One of those characters is the antagonist, The Queen, who comes across as a bit over-the-top maniacal but chews the scenery with gusto and conveys a menacing, wild-eyed sort of madness. There’s clearly something not right with her – and that allows her to be tragic and sympathetic in certain moments. That said, I did roll my eyes a bit when she recites Darth Vader’s “Join me and rule by my side” speech almost verbatim (she is not, as it turns out, Imogen’s father). And while her use of hyperspace as a weapon sounds cool, it mostly happens off screen and we aren’t given a real sense of how it’s causing all this destruction. The one time we see it in action on a small scale raises a bunch of intriguing possibilities for how it could be used in battle… but then, anticlimactically, it’s never seen again. So while the characters work on an emotional level, the overarching story does end up feeling a bit lost amid its tangle of lore about space ancients.
When the view zooms out to the battlefield, Homeworld 3 immediately recaptures the feeling of controlling a fleet of starships, and being able to select a group of ships and put them into one of several formations – from a delta V to a sphere to a claw – and toggle between three different behavior stances is as powerful as ever. Taking in the details as capital ships bombard each other with ballistic weapons and laser beams, their turrets swiveling to track the fighter craft weaving between them leaving streaks of color behind, as explosions constantly go off will never, ever get old. I’m often willing to take more losses than I need to in battle just so I can zoom in, turn off the interface (a one-button convenience), and enjoy the show.
Sure, you’ll get better results by meticulously organizing your ships into control groups, optimizing formations, and prioritizing targets to take out threats to your best ships first (and you’ll need to on higher difficulties). But once you’re confident you have the upper hand, there’s nothing wrong with hitting F4 to select every combat-capable ship in your fleet and ordering them to pick their own targets according to what they’re best at, and blast everything in sight.
Those targets are almost entirely ships of the Queen’s Incarnate fleet, and there are a couple of moments where in-engine cutscenes call back to the original Homeworld by making their fighters feel like an aggressive pack of animals. There are differences between how the enemy fleet operates versus the Hiigarans, but those are mostly relevant in multiplayer; in the campaign, they’re effectively very similar to your own ships (outside of how you have to keep an eye out for pesky capture corvettes that can nab your frigates while you aren’t watching and turn them against you). After fighting the Taiidan Empire and the Vaygr in previous games, I admit I’d hoped for a more dramatic departure from the standard enemy fleet template this time, but the Incarnate certainly put up a decent fight.
Homeworld 3’s 13 campaign missions, which took me around 10 hours to complete on the default difficulty, are easily the most diverse of the Homeworld series, both visually and in their objectives. That’s mostly because of the new direction in map design. Previous Homeworld games have spiced up deep space with colorful nebulas as backdrops, but are largely set in huge empty voids with just a few asteroids floating around in them. Homeworld 3, by contrast, has so many massive objects to navigate through that space can feel downright claustrophobic and cluttered with ancient alien ruins, and often telegraphs choke points where the enemy will warp in. They’re still huge maps relative to most real-time strategy games, of course, but scaling back on the scope means there’s a lot less of building up a fleet and sending it on a long journey toward a target, and that’s a good change that keeps downtime to a minimum.
Several of the mission maps are set within enormous metallic superstructures built by The Progenitor ancients who created the hyperspace cores, which are impressively massive but tend to be a bit industrial and flat. Others, however, take us to very different and visually striking regions of space. After the opening sequence has the Mothership lifting off and doing its shakedown cruise within the atmosphere of Hiigara itself (a first for this series unless you count the ground-based action of Deserts of Kharak), we get missions in a fast-moving asteroid field where you simply have to make it to the other side without your ships getting smashed, another where you must navigate through a crevasse in an enormous ice sheet undetected, lead a small strike group to take out explosive targets without support, and more. (It’s a little silly that the ability to rotate the new horizontal Mothership on its axis exists, but as a fan of the distinctive Space Banana design of old I’m pleased that we’re given the option – even if it’s just to fit through one tight, vertical space.)
Maps frequently made me stop to appreciate their awe-inspiring scope, especially when we’re reminded every so often that these ships we’re throwing around are actually huge and full of people. That’s something that’s easy to forget when you’re zoomed out and watching green and red dots disappear from the tactical map or seeing the distant flash of a capital ship flaming out.
Managing all of that is no small feat, of course, and the controls for Homeworld have always been a bit tricky, given that there’s a whole extra axis of movement to account for than in most real-time strategy games. Homeworld 3 allows you to revert to the camera control scheme from Homeworld Remastered Collection, where your view is bound to a ship or other object and you can rotate around it, but by default you’re given full control of the camera using WASD controls to fly through space, with the option of anchoring to a ship. I think I mostly prefer the old controls, simply because it’s quite easy to accidentally drift off away from the action, but I’m glad the option exists – and in fact, the degree to which the controls and UI are customizable is pretty impressive, with all manner of toggles for how you want them to behave.
But no matter what you choose, getting your ships to move to a precise location can involve swinging the camera around so you can view it from different angles, and that can be frustrating to pull off in a hurry. However, in the single-player campaign at least, the pressure to get it right quickly is completely relieved by the fact that you can pause (or slow time) with the push of a button and fiddle with things until you’ve positioned your orders exactly the way you want them.
That said, whether or not your orders will be obeyed to the letter is another question. Ship behavior is a little iffy, and sometimes I’ve had groups get caught on obstacles, fail to acknowledge they have a line of sight on a target, refuse to grab an object marked as salvageable on the map, or simply not move at all despite repeated requests and asking nicely. That was especially true of getting the big, slow battlecruisers to move in formation, but since they’re only unlocked for the final mission that wasn’t exactly a constant issue. It’s also frustrating when ion frigates and bombers literally can’t hit the broad side of a battlecruiser because they seem to be targeting the very tail end rather than its center mass, and from certain angles they consistently miss their shots.
Being able to pause also mostly alleviates one of my main gripes with how Homeworld 3’s Hiigaran fighters and corvettes behave on their default neutral stance when approached by an enemy ship, which is to shoot back but not scramble. This leaves them sitting ducks, and if you didn’t notice they were in danger ahead of time, you’ll probably be too late to save them – and building new strike craft while your Mothership or carrier are under fire requires you to select each one as it emerges and change its stance or giving it orders immediately.
Much of this terrain has tunnels you can pass ships through in order to bypass defenses and hit a target, but I wasn’t wild about these. For starters, they seem like the only way to succeed in the missions where they’re available, so using them doesn’t feel like a clever maneuver so much as the one thing I could’ve done – like a tutorial, but still happening late in the campaign. After the first novel time it doesn’t seem all that interesting, and it kind of makes the bad guys look silly for not laying mines at the exit. Also, it can be a hassle to get a formation of fighters, bombers, and corvettes to fly through them smoothly – pausing makes it manageable, but they still often get caught on the edges.
Another Homeworld 3 idea born of all of these objects floating in space is that it gives you surfaces to stick deployable turrets to. They’re a bit finicky to place – it’s not always clear why you can put them in one spot but not another – but you can redeploy them as needed, so there’s lots of flexibility. There’s one mission built around them that shows how effective they can be if you manage to turn an area into a chokepoint.
It has to be said that, relative to Homeworld 2, Homeworld 3 feels simpler. I miss the flexibility, options, and rewards that came from mechanics like subsystem targeting brought. Without that, the only real nuance to battering down an enemy’s battlecruiser’s HP bar – beyond choosing suitable anti-capital ship weapons for your attack – is positioning your ships to hit it from the rear for a damage bonus. But that’s hard to do considering how much ships move and rotate around in combat, so the only way to manage it consistently is to fully surround your target. Also, without veterancy (where ships that’ve seen enough combat get stat bonuses) to think about, ships feel entirely disposable; you do get to carry your surviving fleet from one mission to the next, but since they’re no stronger all that saves you is a little bit of time spent harvesting resources to get up and running at the beginning, and you can choose to start with a default fleet instead if you want. On the other hand, this game marks a return to building individual fighters instead of entire squadrons at once as we do in Homeworld 2, and that adds a welcome bit of extra control to how groups are composed.
While I appreciated the variety of settings and objectives throughout the campaign, I was left wishing it’d taken more cues from StarCraft 2 in its design when it comes to replayability. There are no optional objectives to try for on a subsequent run, and because each ship has just one upgrade to unlock (which makes them feel obligatory rather than optional) instead of a choice between two or more mutually exclusive options, there’s no real reason to come back for another go other than the simple challenge of cranking up the difficulty another notch. It’s kind of a bummer not to have that variety available in the campaign, particularly when I look at the ship variants introduced in the War Games multiplayer mode.
That’s especially true because Homeworld 3 has the fewest types of Hiigaran ships to play with of the series, mostly due to the fact that there’s only one type of corvette. It’s certainly enough to get the job done, but feels a little thin when composing a fleet. Instead, frigates are the backbone of any group, and that’s where the vast majority of the Hiigarans’ variety and flexibility lies. You get to choose from straightforward assault frigates, long-range missile frigates, ion beam frigates, minelayer frigates, support (repair) frigates, and barrage (anti-fighter) frigates, and finding a balance between those is generally where the interesting decisions behind building a strike group arise.
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