Homeworld 2

Section: 

Â"Rolling back the days with my friend I love to playÂ"

Homeworld 2 is the sequel to the original Homeworld. There, that's the review and you can stop reading now. Somehow I think I'll get a good old fashioned Certis Â"bull whips and leather masksÂ" beating if I don't keep writing however, so I'll write some more. There's plenty of things that get better with age. Good albums are one, good movies too. Fortunately for us, good gameplay just keeps getting better with age as well and Homeworld 2 is no exception. Homeworld 2 is Homeworld refined and distilled into a gorgeous, tight and user friendly little bottle. Does that mean there aren't any flaws? Hell no, there's plenty. Read on for more.

Gameplay Basics
Â"yeah, fall on into those single file lines and complete the plansÂ"

Like I said, Homeworld 2 shares much with it's pedigree Homeworld. If you have played Homeworld the basic gameplay will be old hat to you. Homeworld 2 is a real time strategy game in full 3D. Not just the engine and physics like in Warcraft III, the actual gameplay itself is in 3D. It's set in the void of space which means your units can move left, right, up and down freely without restraint. You collect resources from asteroids and build ships to attack your opponents. That's pretty much the gist of it. The freedom of movement adds all kinds of new tactics to the gameplay if you're used to games such as Warcraft and Total Anihilation. I can't count the times I've had enemies jump me from above while my camera wasn't looking in that particular direction.

Of course, like any RTS there are a variety of units at your disposal. One of the unique points about the Homeworld series is the scale of it all, you can build capital class ships that can accommodate the rest of your fleet in it's hull. Not to mention the gargantuan special units you will get in the single player story. Each unit has it's own strengths and weaknesses, Interceptors are good against fighters but weak against capital ships while Ion Cannon frigates are great against capital ships but weak against smaller units. You need a fair balance of units to stage a successful attack and there are limits to how many units of each type you can have.


Story
Â"I think I'm free but the dogs they won't release meÂ"

The story of Homeworld 2 is set several years after the ending of Homeworld, in which you found and defended your home planet Hiigara. Don't worry, I won't spoil anything for you. Suffice to say, you think Hiigara is safe but guess again! The story this time around is occasionally great with leaps of boredom thrown in for good measure. At times it is very good, especially in the last mission however it often ends up getting dragged down. Pacing is all over the place. You spend 3 missions going somewhere and when you get there 8,000 things happen with the story in one cutscene. It's just not very satisfying. The story does it's job, it holds everything together believably, it just wasn't compelling to me. Of course it is a video game, I might have expected too much because of the high standards the first game set for me. The acting is just fine, since there really are only three voices in the whole game. Most of the time you are listening to the Narrator who does a pretty admirable job. The main bad guy, Maakan, is a little less enjoyable. At times he gets downright cliched. Karen Sjet, better known as Fleet Command, does a fine job as well though her voice is mainly limited to the typical noise of gameplay.

Difficulty
Â"Too much trippin' and my soul's worn thinÂ"

One of the reasons I was picked to do this review was that the rest of the staff were scared of the game. It seems I was the only one with the testicular fortitude to stand up to the challenge. Of course I beat the game like a redheaded stepchild, which in reality means I cried myself to sleep several times over the course of the game. The problem isn't really the difficulty however, it's the lack of flexibility. There are no difficulty sliders, no readjustment if you lose and no way to increase the resources to start with. They balanced the game so that you have to play like a packrat. You build as many units as possible before moving on to the next mission since you can take your units with you. Each mission expects you to have as many units as possible before attacking anything. If you don't do this, you're screwed. If you do this, the missions actually become pretty balanced and fun which is why I enjoyed the single player campaign just fine.

This also causes the problem of boredom all too often. I would enjoy the hell out of a mission only to have to sit there for an hour after the battle was over rebuilding my fleet. Now, in some of the earlier missions it's not a problem if you can manage to not lose many ships. Later on it just becomes impossible to come out of a battle with a perfect fleet.

A simple difficulty slider would have solved all of these problems and there's really no excuse for it. A drop down menu with Â"NormalÂ", Â"EasyÂ" and Â"HardÂ" would've been fine but no such menu exists.

User Interface
Â"Her name is what it meansÂ"

I cannot sing the praises of the user interface enough, it is simply perfect. When Jesus comes back to do whatever, he's going to do it using the Homeworld 2 user interface. Every time I wanted an option, or needed a control it was there. Formations, tactics, research, building and unit status all managed to be put on the screen together, with hotkeys for everything. When you hover over anything you see the hotkey for it and a description of what it does. I'm not talking about Â"these three actions have hotkeys, the rest don'tÂ", everything in the game has a hotkey and popup help for it. Somehow I figured out how to rotate through my list of my mothership class ships simply by hitting Â"homeÂ" and I never read one manual.

Hotkeys are also multifunction, hitting Â"bÂ" several times will rotate through any ship you have that can build units. Â"SmartÂ" right clicking also makes a welcome appearance. It was sorely missed in the first one, though Catyclism fixed the situation. The screen too crowded for you? Minimize the UIs and use hotkeys. Just keep the UI on the screen and everything can be controlled with your mouse, no hotkeys required. The on screen documentation is also excellent, I never had to glance at the keyboard shortcut card that came with the game. This should help newbies as well since I never looked anything up, I simply hovered my mouse over it and it told me what I needed to know. An excellent tutorial helps in this area as well. Occasionally selecting units was difficult because of the camera angle, though that could be fixed by zooming in. Other than that I can't think of a complaint about the UI and I'm a man who likes to complain. I like to complain almost as much as I like taffy.

Graphics
Â"pick a flower, hold your breath and drift away...Â"

The graphics for the game are a major improvement over the first game. They are definitely well done, though not particularly technically impressive. The polygon counts have increased, there are all kinds of new effects such as the new hyperspace effect and the ships are much more detailed than before. Still, it's nothing out of the ordinary for today's games. Though whatever points the game loses in technical innovations it more than makes up for it in art direction and style. If you ever looked at outer space and thought it was pretty or idolized Astronauts as a kid, this game captures that feeling and magnifies it. The ships are graceful and fluid with motion and the exhaust trails create little spiderwebs in battle as they crisscross each other. Huge ships have detailed hulls and huge glowing engines while little ships flit about in their wake. When the Gatekeeper fires it's large cannon you see it burn through ships like paper. The backgrounds were beautiful, they made you feel like space wasn't some empty boring place for once. Maybe I'm just a scifi freak but I simply love watching battles in this game.


Click here to view the rest of the Homeworld 2 gallery!

Multiplayer
Â"fine place for a day full of breakdownsÂ"

The multiplayer part of the review will be admittedly short. When I tried to get online to find someone to play all of the rooms were empty except the Â"BeginnerÂ" room, which had 3 games open. I did manage to get a game going after getting off of the GameSpy powered in game service but that was all of the multiplayer gaming I got to do. It worked well, there wasn't any noticable lag and the units seemed pretty balanced. There aren't many options that I could see, simply a Deathmatch mode. However the planned mod tools will allow new mutliplayer gametypes so hopefully there will be more variety in the future. For now, unless you have a group of people you plan on playing with don't count on the public Internet play to hold you. Here at GWJ though I know I'd love to start up some Homeworld 2 games as it was fun when you can play.

Conclusions
Â"flies in the vasoline we are, sometimes it blows my mindÂ"

In the end, Homeworld 2 is a very similar experience to Homeworld, the sequel hasn't fundamentally changed in any way. It didn't change much because it didn't have to, Homeworld 2 is just better for the most part. The user interface is great, the graphics better and the whole package just feels much slicker. The difficulty problems may throw you but once you learn the ropes the single player game is quite fun. Multiplayer is good fun if you can manage to get some people to play. If you're a fan of the first one, or you can manage to stick through the difficulty problems I highly recommend this game. If the rumors of difficulty problems are keeping you away you probably should wait for a patch to add a difficulty slider. It's a very fun game though, a worthy sucessor to the original Homeworld.

Pyroman[FO]

Comments

The multiplayer is a pretty good amount of fun until Pyro attacks you, then it's not quite as fun. That is, unless waiting to die is fun, I guess some might think so.

Nice to know I'm not the only person walking around with STP lyrics stuck in my head.