The original Homeworld (HW) wasn't merely a game; it was a work of art. It took fairly straightforward RTS mechanics, with a few notable exceptions, and fused them with the most visually beautiful and aurally haunting experience of space ever created. Its cut scenes using the in-game engine almost rivaled the fidelity of cartoons on mainstream television. Its pre-rendered cut scenes were beautiful black and white pieces of story exposition. The game was a smashing success in virtually every regard.
And then along came Homeworld: Cataclysm (HW:C) and upped the bar even further. Seriously, it fixed all of the problems of the original game, added a bunch of new stuff, wedded it to a gripping story, and provided the player with an even more compelling game experience. Obviously, any further sequel has some tough acts to follow. The Homeworld series has essentially set the standard for merging gaming and art, and, as such, the recently released Homeworld 2 (HW2) has to be measured against some pretty high standards. Bear that in mind from the outset.
Visually, the Homeworld series just continues to get better and better. The original game was so beautiful it was a work of art, and HW:C continued that tradition with some minor improvements. HW2 makes a more obvious yet not revolutionary step forward in its graphics. The ship models are far more detailed, the textures are of higher resolution, and the special effects are greatly improved, particularly in terms of battle damage accrued by capital ships.
Further, the pre-rendered cut scenes are at a higher resolution than before, which makes them far more attractive. I really enjoyed the black and white story-telling of the previous games, but the video was chunky or blocky enough during playback that it didn't look nearly as nice as the in-game sequences. This defect has largely been eradicated. The pre-rendered cut scenes in HW2 look better, feature higher-quality animation, and play back far more smoothly than before.
Unfortunately, this all comes at a price. I was able to play the original HW and HW:C at relatively high resolutions. Despite having much faster hardware today, I dare not run HW2 above 1024 x 768 x 32 bpp if I want all the graphical goodies enabled. In the plus column, however, it seems that my ATI Radeon 9700 Pro is powerful enough to give me 2x full-scene anti-aliasing (quality mode) and 8x anisotropic filtering without too much slowdown. Suffice it to say I was surprised that HW2 doesn't want to run smoothly at higher resolutions on my system, which currently sports an Athlon 3000, the Radeon video card, and 1 GB of physical RAM.
A more minor complaint requires me to ask the developers a question: does space really need to be so colorful? Seriously, some of the mission backgrounds seemed like the artists were armed with a bright, bold palette of colors and given the mandate that space can be anything but black. I'm all for making the "terrain" look good and be a functional part of the game, but it sure would have been nice if space were a little less colorful and a little less populated by derelicts and what not.
Frankly, this one artistic change ruins the whole we're-really-alone-out-here feeling of the first two games; i.e., it seems like you're always in the middle of a cosmic junkyard. As an old friend of mine would say, you can't swing a dead cat in HW2 without hitting a derelict, a ship graveyard, an asteroid field, or something else. The desolate, cold, and harsh beauty of empty space is simply absent from this game and that's a pity.
This is going to sound really strange, coming from a guy who bought an extra copy of the HW game-of-the-year edition just for the soundtrack CD, but the music in HW2 isn't all that gripping. It took me a few missions to put my finger on why it was a disappointment, but I'm confident of the reason: the orchestration just isn't right for the game. The music from the first two games relied largely upon a unique combination of unusual instruments paired with various synthesized tones. This gave the music an otherworldly beauty and made the game very special.
The music in HW2 takes a different direction by featuring a far more conventional orchestration. Don't get me wrong: I love a conventional orchestra as much as anyone, and I think it works wonderfully well for most games. For HW2, however, the whole feel is wrong. The violins, cellos, and other traditional instruments are so firmly rooted here on Earth that the music in HW2 is subtly very different from the previous games. That's not to say it's bad music; the composer clearly went for a more organic feeling and achieved exactly that. It's simply the case that the organic approach is ill-chosen in light of the whole vibe established by the previous games.
Aside from that complaint, though, the audio is very good. The voice acting is all top-notch, the sound effects are well done, and I particularly liked the improved weapon sounds. The old assault frigates always sounded kind of wimpy to me when firing. In contrast, I can see how the new flak frigates could inspire some serious fear merely from the sound of their guns. Aside from my complaint about the orchestration, everything else sounds good and works well.
The interface has been improved in several respects, first and foremost of which in my mind is the addition of the unified interface panels. It was one of the strengths of the original game that it gave the player such a beautiful view of space thanks to the minimal interface, but that also complicated matters to a certain extent. The thing I find most amusing is that I had nothing but praise for the HW and HW:C interfaces, the reason being that I never realized how much nicer it would have been to have more controls. The fact that those games featured true 3D freedom was so liberating that I managed to miss the degree to which their sparse interfaces were a hindrance.
After playing HW2 for a while, it became clear that the two previous games were lacking in this regard. HW2 adds a nice set of very functional panels that allow the player to queue up research, building, and get all sorts of useful information at a glance. Better still, the research and build trees have been greatly simplified by breaking them down into multiple sub-panels. I never realized how irritating it was to have to hunt and peck through a list of twenty to thirty ships to find what I wanted to build in the previous games until I played HW2.
It's also worth mentioning that the camera-control interface finally works like it should. I never understood why neither of the two previous games supplied any ability to translate the camera around. Whereas the previous games forced the camera to be tied directly to a ship, HW2 supplies exactly the sort of ability to move the camera around that makes battles and other circumstances much easier to manage. It's also great for capturing pretty screen shots. Kudos to the developers for adding a long-overdue feature!
Despite the improvements I have two complaints with the interface, the first being that it lacks the flexible waypoints introduced by HW:C. One of the great things about HW:C was that it provided the player with the best waypoint-specification possibilities I'd seen in a real-time strategy (RTS) game. For example, I could use circular waypoints for patrol routes along the perimeter of an area. The result was that I always had great intel when I needed it. Similarly, I could set up other circular-waypoint patrol routes with vessels ready to engage the enemy. I can't do that in HW2, and though it isn't a crucial lack I have felt its absence.
Second, I really liked being able to bring up a context sensitive menu in HW:C, but this feature isn't included in HW2. This normally isn't much of a problem, insofar as the addition of a panel full of special options for the selected ships is provided. But I would still prefer not having to move the mouse so much. Whereas in HW:C I could select ships, right click something, and select the action I wished performed, HW2 forces me to move the mouse down to the special panel or memorize the keystrokes. Maybe I'm missing something, but that really strikes me as a step backward in interface design.
On the whole, I suspect HW2 is more accessible to the novice RTS gamer than its predecessors, and that's probably a good thing. Yes, it has a few warts, but the interface in HW2 does get the job done relatively well.
The game mechanics have been given a makeover in several respects, some good and some bad. In the good category, the ability to target ship subsystems is surprisingly handy. I've made it a habit whenever I locate an enemy carrier or shipyard to send a squadron or two of bombers to take out their building subsystems immediately. I frequently don't have the firepower to destroy the whole ship, but taking out the building subsystems does buy some valuable time. The addition of strike groups is also great and long-overdue, but I'll talk more about that later.
Also in the plus column is the fact that the player no longer has to spend lots of time at the end of each mission gathering up all the resources on the map. That was a serious problem with the original game, and though HW:C provided a time-compression mechanism it was still a less than perfect solution. HW2 nails the concept perfectly: when the mission ends in success it's simply assumed that the player would take the time to gather all the available resources. That's great!
Unfortunately, while HW2 gets the concept right it really botches the implementation. At the end of many of the missions, the player's fleet will be in a relative shambles. That was never a problem in the previous two games because the player could always take his time to evaluate and rebuild before making the next jump into hyperspace. HW2 screws this up badly insofar as it forces the mission to end as soon as the last objective is completed, regardless of whether you want to keep playing or not. The developers could have fixed this so easily just by giving the player a button to indicate he's ready to continue. That way, the player could do as he wishes at the end of each mission yet still reap the benefits of automatic resource collection.
It also stinks that the developers force you through the objectives whether you're ready or not. As in the previous games, running off to complete an objective as quickly as possible can be suicidal. You see, objectives have a way of making bad things happen to the player because of the game's design. Veterans of the series will understand what I'm talking about. For those who don't get it, consider that fulfilling objectives is frequently used as the trigger for various nasty things and you'll surely get my meaning. Whereas the wise player was cautious about fulfilling mission objectives in HW and HW:C, he has no choice in HW2; the important ones will complete themselves if left unattended long enough.
For example, in mission three (i.e., "Sarum") the player is tasked with first defending and then repairing the damaged Nabaal shipyard. Because I needed some time to rebuild my forces after coming to its defense, I didn't send my workers to repair it. I figured I'd get to it after I rebuilt my fleet. Imagine my surprise when the game suddenly announced that repairs on the shipyard had been finished! Not only was that fatally jarring to my suspension of disbelief and immersion in the game, it also forced me into the next phase of the mission whether I was ready or not. That really pissed me off, and I wish I could say it was the only such example; sadly, it wasn't.
My final gripe with the game mechanics, which is only exacerbated by the issues mentioned already, is that HW2 suffers from guess-right-or-die (GRoD) syndrome. The fact that missions end immediately when the objectives are completed gives the player no time to rethink and/or rebuild at the end of a mission, which can lead to great frustration. Mission three was basically impossible for me from the outset because I didn't have enough bombers; by the time I knew I needed a lot of bombers I couldn't build them enough fast enough to win. It was only by loading the previous mission that I was able to build enough bombers before it ended so that when I started mission three I absolutely annihilated all the infiltrator frigates and carriers within minutes. What had previously been a largely un-winnable grind was suddenly a cakewalk.
The same was true of mission six (i.e., "The Karos Graveyard"). In it, you face a new and unknown type of ship called "movers". Unfortunately, if you guess wrong how to handle them, you're screwed. They're attracted to corvettes like flies to... uh... "stuff", so if you have a good number of corvettes you can keep them busy. If not, however, then they'll tear through your frigates like a warm knife through butter before doing the same to the rest of your forces. Naturally, given my luck, I had too few corvettes left from the previous mission—yes, because it ended immediately upon completing the last objective—and had too many interceptors, bombers, and capital ships. The result was that I was slaughtered hopelessly within a couple of minutes. How lovely that was.
It's not that I mind losing missions when I make bad decisions. That's part of the fun of playing a game and learning how it works. It really ticks me off, however, when my choices simply don't matter, when I'm essentially forced into one crap shoot after another that only reloading and replaying can solve should the dice come up snake eyes.
Only three hyperspace cores, eh? Did anyone else get that impression from the previous two games? I sure didn't. And what's up with the sudden and hokey turn toward pseudo-religion? I don't want to spoil all the surprises, but I thought the story was pretty lame.
You see, there's a bad guy who fancies himself divinely chosen, which naturally—I say 'naturally' because almost every portrayal of religion in popular culture is either (1) a pointless crutch for the weak-minded, or (2) the motivator behind psychos and false messiahs—requires him to lay siege to Hiigara. In response, you've got to go find God, who turns out not to be god in any conventional sense, and a big old dreadnought—siege cannon anyone?—that's conveniently collecting space dust to... Oh, nevermind.
Maybe I'm growing overly critical as I play more games, but whereas the first two entries in the Homeworld series had great, gripping, powerful stories, HW2's story seems both strangely inconsistent with and derivative from them all at the same time. Thanks to a friend who brought it to my attention, I'd even read the on-line history of Hiigara prior to playing HW2, but that didn't help harmonize it with its predecessors. Maybe others will like the story better, but I don't think much of it.
Of course, stories don't make or break games. They can lend a sense of importance, depth, and "reality" to game worlds, but even the greatest story can't make a bad game good (e.g., most games based on the Lord of the Rings) while the very worst story can't hold a great game back (e.g., DOOM). In the case of HW2 the story is weak, but this isn't a fatal flaw.
In the content department, I'm grateful the developers fixed the things that had previously annoyed me most: (1) the silly, ship-twitching problems are resolved completely, (2) the docking pile-up problem is fixed, and (3) babysitting an armada is no longer necessary. Regarding (1), ships coming in to dock or needing to make slight course corrections "twitched" in the previous two games. HW:C was better about it than HW, but it still wasn't right. It really shatters the illusion when your fighters whip back and forth doing the twist while trying to dock. Because HW2 also separates entrance and exit ports for docking, the whole process is faster and smoother which solves (2) rather nicely.
HW2 also fixes (3) by the addition of strike groups, which may be formed from any number and class of ship. A strike group is more than just a new game mechanic for organizing a fleet; it is also a new way to employ the game's AI, and that's why it deserves its own paragraph here. A strike group not only moves as a whole, with all of the ships staying together regardless of their maximum speeds, it also attacks as a whole.
I don't know if the developers had to add special code for this or not. What I do know is that a strike group seems to delegate tasks pretty intelligently. Corvettes and fighters provide cover for frigates and capital ships, while bombers go to work on enemy frigates. What's more, the three different strike-group formations give the player good flexibility in deployment. This feature is both helpful and welcome to say the least.
Aside from these issues, the content of the game is pretty similar to the previous games. There aren't any big, innovative surprises here; the same old fighters, bombers, corvettes, frigates, and capital ships are all back for more, though it seems like more emphasis is placed on carriers this time around. The missions are generally interesting and somewhat varied, the environments are pretty diverse, and so forth. There is plenty of gaming value to be found in HW2, and that's a good thing.
The multi-player aspect of the game is a letdown insofar as it's limited to a straight-up fight. The previous games had a few different modes, which provided a good bit of variety, but HW2's multi-player game is pure deathmatch in space. That's fun, but it's obviously far more limiting than the other games in the series. Perhaps a future patch or third-party mods will change this. Only time will tell.
Far worse is that practically nobody is playing HW2! I've tried on several occasions to find an Internet game and was surprised each time to find precisely zero games and people in the west's section. On one occasion there were a whopping four games in the beginner's section, but those were all full. And, for the record, I'm checking at the busiest gaming times of day! In short, there isn't much to the multi-player game, and there aren't exactly a lot of opportunities to play it.
I'm truly sorry to say it, but HW2 just doesn't live up to the standards set by the previous two games. It does bring some welcome improvements to the series, but it also stumbles in some important respects. If you were a big fan of either (or both) of the previous games, then you'll probably enjoy HW2 as well, but don't expect to be amazed like you probably were before.
In my own case, I liked HW and liked HW:C all the more, but I don't like HW2 as much as either of them. I do think HW2 was still worth the money, but only because I got it on sale at the GoGamer web site. It wouldn't have been worth a full $50 to me, so I suggest others who have decided to buy the game try to find it on sale somewhere as well.
The final verdict is that HW2 is a good game, but it's not a great one like both of its predecessors. If you really like the series, then buy HW2 when it's on sale. The same goes for those who love space-based RTS games in general. If money is tight or you're not in one of those categories, however, then I suspect you would do better with a different RTS title like Command & Conquer: Generals or various first-person shooter games like Jedi Academy or Tron 2.0.
10/26/2003