Up to a point, things follow the familiar RTS rock-paper-scissors cycle, where each troop type trumps another type, but is vulnerable to something else. Both Homeworld games play smart with their mission design, slowly piling on the complexity during each skirmish, and pushing you to build more, research more and use it all as intelligently as possible. Of course, it’s not all about the spectacle. Homeworld always delivered on scale, and video-game space opera simply doesn’t get any bigger or better. Even now, there’s something magical about watching a new squad of fighters emerge from the mothership and speed towards the enemy, or taking a ringside seat as frigates duke it out, interceptors and corvettes battling around them as bombers swoop and dive in for the kill. To play Homeworld: Remastered Collection is to venture back into an era when even mainstream blockbusters expected you to work a little for your fun. Master the basics of camera control, movement and attacking and you’ll still face a bewildering range of ship formations and attack commands, all best controlled in the heat of battle using keyboard shortcuts. What’s more, where you’d think the tactical map would snap to an intelligent, top-down view once engaged, it has a nasty habit of switching to some peculiarly unhelpful angle, making it almost tricky to see what you’re doing without a few adjustments. You might get through without ever sending fighter squadrons off in the wrong direction or throwing resource collectors at an area without any resources, but it’s not hard to make such mistakes. The original Homeworld has had its interface reworked to bring it in line with Homeworld 2, but the camera and UI are still where the game is at its clunkiest. Even moving to and from the tactical map takes getting used to. The 3D presentation is hard to get your head around at first, and it’s worth going through the tutorials just to familiarise yourself with the camera controls, so that you can focus in on individual ships or flicking quickly between battlefield events in a hurry. Homeworld has the ’90s RTS preoccupation with harvesting resources, and you’ll still spend as much time building units and supplies within the Mothership, or researching upgrade trees, as you’ll spend commanding your fighters and frigates on the battlefield. And while it doesn’t look like a traditional RTS, it still plays very much like one. Homeworld was one of the first RTS games to embrace a 3D world, though you’ll soon notice that, while ships are shown swooping downwards or soaring upwards, the actual strategy still takes place on a 2D plane. It’s interesting to note that while both Homeworlds run low on cut-scenes and talking-head interjections, the story they tell is still more absorbing than those in many more modern strategy games, partly because of the understated voicework and superb orchestral score, and partly because the narrative is part and parcel of the gameplay, not something thrown on top to chivvy you along. It might sound like an Iain M Banks rewrite of Battlestar Galactica, but the Homeworld saga is epic stuff.īoth games see you marshalling a growing fleet of fighters, support craft and battleships through a series of encounters, tackling raiders, skirmishers and imperial armadas as you work to complete your next objective – or just survive. What begins with the desperate flight of a decimated people on board a vast mothership ends with the search for their original homeworld, then continues on to an attack by deep-space warlords and a quest to reunite three mysterious cores. A few components might feel rusty or unwieldy, but it’s mostly a joy to play. It’s not hard to see Homeworld’s roots in the ’90s real-time strategy boom, yet there’s also something oddly timeless about its epic take on deep-space, ship-to-ship combat something awe-inspiring that hasn’t dimmed in the dozen years since the sequel launched. It brings Homeworld and Homeworld 2 into one superb retro remaster, and while this means it misses out the first game’s Cataclysm expansion, this still makes for a meaty single-player saga. Homeworld Remastered Collection might have some extensive visual upgrades and some tweaks to the controls and gameplay, but the best thing about it is the underlying game. If only all old classics aged as well as this.
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