Homeworld 3, the deep space zone

Publié le 6/14/2024

Before anything else, here is an extended version of the wonderful Bentusi’s theme for you.

Do not, I repeat, do not expect an unbiased review from me! I discovered this universe with Homeworld 2 and I love it. It’s still my point of reference when picturing very distant science fiction. And a rather low-tech one at that! One can imagine everyone in magboots inside those ships. The only shield available is a short-span, specialised frigate, and it’s really tricky to use them properly. The debris and asteroid used as resources are literally moved to the mothership, and you repair everything because each ship is insanely expensive. And yes, it makes sense to simply split open said mothership when releasing a new carrier! The hyperspace cores are the only piece of “magic”, and sure enough, they are the main focus of the conflict.

That’s well and all, but I had a problem. Even though I loved the story, I never got to beat HW2. You have to perfectly know who-defeats-who, carefully plan mothership and carrier modules, production is slow and fights are not. I tried several times. At best, I manage a Pyrrhic victory on the third mission with this damn Naabal Shipyard, and I never truly recover. It ends in a disaster down the line at mission 5. I don’t multitask well, and I get overwhelmed every time. I willingly admit that I perform poorly at strategy games.

Now, I have a confession to make. At the fourth or fifth complete rerun, I got frustrated and took a look at the save format. It’s text-based and relatively easy to decipher. Sooooo, I got to duplicate units between missions. The game sure is easier to beat this way!

This little trick blatantly highlighted that the game cheated too! My old computer did not like the battle between my 200 interceptors and my opponent’s 200 anti-interceptors. The game does not enforce unit limits at loading. Why would it? It seems there are no constraints whatsoever because you can have multiple clones of unique units. Yup, that’s really fun too!

I later played HW1 Remastered and it kicked my butt on the last mission with the same dynamic system as HW2. Damn it.

So I splurged on HW3.

The first pleasant surprise was that it runs on my late GTX 1070. Even with low settings, it’s beautiful, but then again, that’s art direction for you!

As far as I am concerned, this is a perfectly fine successor. The visual and musical landscapes are very similar. The story is simple, as were the previous ones. Each mission is impactful and memorable, and so are the people depicted.

By the way, kudos for making sure we feel there are humans on those ships! The sadness when hearing “The frigate is gone. We lost them” is unreal. You bet I searched the whole map for those pesky capture corvettes.

The second and third nice surprises: difficulty settings and ✨ slow mode ✨. I think I played more than half the storyline at a quarter the speed. This is the best thing ever! And it’s available in other modes too, now!

At that point, I don’t care about anything else, and I won’t read other reviews. I just want to enjoy this in peace.

For the first time, I got to play a real-time strategy game at my pace.

Thank you very much for that!