Homeworld 3 Review: 3D RTS Falls Flat

Homeworld revolutionized the real-time strategy genre in 1999. It is the first RTS to allow full 3D movement of units. All the player’s spacecraft from one level carry over to the next, giving a sense of continuity and investment in one’s fleet. The graphics, sound effects, and music are superb. Its story, the tale of an exiled people who rediscover millennia of their history and journey across the galaxy to reclaim their birthright, is more emotionally compelling than most RPGs I’ve played. Homeworld stands tall among the best space combat sims and RTSes ever made.

Homeworld 2 plays to the same strengths. Its premise isn’t as amazing as the first game’s (hell, that’s a tough act to follow), but the story’s pacing and plot twists are just as effective. It’s prettier visually and deeper strategically. Its mission design really shines, with most levels more varied and exciting than HW1′s. Music and audio remain on point. HW2 could never be as revelatory as the debut, but it’s unquestionably an excellent game.

As a Homeworld lover who followed the series since the first game’s development, my expectations were sky-high. I really wanted this modern sequel to be great.

Homeworld 3 is not great. It’s a poor successor to the giants of yesteryear, an unsatisfying RTS, and a mediocre game overall. That hurts to write, but it’s true.

What It Gets Right

The game looks good, with skillful use of modern rendering techniques. Weapon effects are suitably punchy. Ships show battle damage and explode majestically. Dust or ice clouds enshroud vessels. Lighting, shadows, reflections, and transparency elevate the realism. I’m sure its raytracing is real pretty if your GPU can do it (mine can’t).

The audio is as great as ever. Radio chatter and sound effects set the mood and punctuate the action. Veteran Homeworld composer Paul Ruskay does further fantastic work. Voice actors give fine performances, despite the lackluster script.

There are a lot of welcome improvements to the user interface.

The camera can be set to behave as before, snapping the view to the currently selected unit or group, or to roam wherever the player commands using traditional WASD movement keys. To aid in navigating the battlefield, there’s the “sensor gyro,” a kind of events compass with colored pointers to objectives, locations of interest, and the site of any current engagements.

The tabbed Build and Research panels of Homeworld Remastered Collection are combined into a single list with collapsible sections. Under the HUD display for resource units (RUs), a negative number shows the cost of any queued research/build orders, so the player can tell if RUs will run out before it’s all done. A hotkey selects damaged units from the current group (you can set the threshold with a percentage slider in settings), which is handy for ordering strike craft to dock or finding which frigates are taking a beating to pull them back for repairs.

During cinematics, you press one key to pause or hold another to skip. I wish every game did this.

Along with the expected tactical pause, which stops the action but lets you look around the battlefield and issue orders, Homeworld 3 lets you slow down the game speed at 25% increments. (Shame there’s no fast-forward as well.) This is far and away my favorite new feature. I’d kill to have this in Homeworld Remastered Collection. Even for high-APM players, it’s just cool to watch the mayhem in slo-mo.

But Alas

As I fought through the single-player campaign, dread crept over me. It looks and sounds like Homeworld, but it doesn’t feel right. Why wasn’t I experiencing the same engagement, satisfaction, and fun as before?

Homeworld 1 & 2 Give Me the Feels

To understand the answer, you need to know what fans expected. In Homeworld, each particular ship type excels at defeating one ship class. With sufficient numbers or clever tactics, each type can be effective against a second or third class (see chart). It’s like rock-paper-scissors with a more complex Venn diagram. There are always several valid answers to an enemy threat.

ship type	ship class	target class	secondary target(s)
Interceptor	Fighter	Fighters	Corvettes
Bomber	Fighter	Capital Ships	Frigates, Corvettes
Gunship	Corvette	Fighters	Corvettes
Pulsar Gunship	Corvette	Corvettes	Frigates, Capital Ships
Flak Frigate	Frigate	Fighters	Corvettes
Torpedo Frigate	Frigate	Corvettes	Frigates, Capital Ships
Ion Cannon Frigate	Frigate	Capital Ships	Frigates
Destroyer	Capital Ship	Frigates	Capital Ships
Battlecruiser	Capital Ship	Capital Ships	Frigates

Strategy matters. Which ships to build, how to group them, where they should move, and what targets they’re assigned to handle—it all makes a difference. Decisive outcomes make it clear what works and what doesn’t. With good strats, ships will eliminate their targets and come home nearly unscathed. If lots of fighters get killed or big ships take heavy damage, there’s probably a better way.

Tactics matter. Formations and aggressive/evasive/passive behavior are important, as is coordinating the attack of different types of units. How frigates and capital ships maneuver while engaged has a huge effect on the result.

This system feels good. When you first see a big blob of approaching ships, you think, “Oh shit! How am I gonna deal with all that?” Then you get to work, sending interceptors to kill fighters, pulsar gunships for corvettes, and two destroyers to mop up the frigates. It works beautifully, all your units survive except maybe a couple interceptors, and you feel like a badass. Finding a good answer is satisfying, like solving a puzzle.

This is Homeworld’s magic. Lots of meaningful choices, multiple effective options, and clear feedback about what works.

Why Are You So Bad at This?

Homeworld 3 is all out of whack. Precious few units are properly good at their jobs. Ship types are not sufficiently differentiated.

Sure, fighters are fast, but not enough to keep from being shot down by practically anything they encounter, not just anti-fighter specialists.

The worst unit in the game is also the only corvette option. Railgun corvettes are intended to attack capital ships at long range, so we’re told. They don’t keep their distance, and worse, stop dead when they fire. This is so wrongheaded it makes my ears bleed. Speed is the main advantage these ships have over the destroyers and battlecruisers they’re meant to attack. It’s what keeps them alive and fighting. When they stop to shoot, they become sitting ducks for their target (or any nearby enemy). They don’t last long.

In the previous games, destroyers mean death for frigates because they have a huge range advantage and can eliminate two or three frigates before they get close enough to strike back. They are consummate kiting units: once engaged, if ordered to move back towards reinforcements to maintain range, they continue attacking all the while. They’re awesome because they deal damage without receiving it. Not anymore! HW3′s destroyers and even battlecruisers nose up real close to their targets, just trading fire.

Battlecruisers seem reluctant to keep shooting, doing oddly unnecessary automatic maneuvers instead, although their turret weapons shouldn’t be affected.

Vitiated

All the basic systems have been flattened. Resourcing, research, building, unit behaviors.

Previously, resource collectors were vulnerable. They had to return to resource controllers, carriers, or the Mothership before RUs were added to your coffers. Resources were concentrated in a few spots on each map, making them natural sites of contention. Defending resourcing operations was imperative to keep building and prevent the enemy from taking over. In HW3, resources are scattered all over the place, you get them as soon as they’re picked up, and resource collectors are comparatively sturdy and cheap. So there’s no need to consider where to set up shop or how to protect it. In the single-player campaign, the enemy doesn’t collect resources at all, so there’s no chance to slow it down by starving its economy. It gets its scripted allotment of forces no matter what.

Research used to be expensive and slow, and you could only work on one thing at a time. Players had to decide what to research and in what order. Similarly, each production ship can build only one unit at once. If you have to reinforce both bombers and ion frigates, you need to decide which has higher priority. In Homeworld 3, you can build every type of ship and research any available options simultaneously.

Time is HW1&2′s implicit second resource. It matters fuck-all in HW3.

Homeworld simulates physics for ballistic weapons, which means that any ship (friend or foe) between an attacker and target can be hit by accident, and shots that fly wide of the target can hit something behind it. This works beautifully with the aggressive/evasive/passive behaviors. Fighters set to evasive weave and juke to avoid fire; on aggressive they concentrate on flying straight to deal damage, come what may. HW3 has simulated ballistics, but no behavior orders, so it makes little difference.

Homeworld 2′s system of modular upgrades for capital ships adds great depth. Research modules, advanced sensor arrays, fire control towers (which buff nearby allies), cloak generators, hyperspace modules. These systems—plus capital ships’ main guns and engines—can be targeted and destroyed, depriving the enemy of their use well before the whole ship is blown up. You can defang battlecruisers by destroying their main weapons, disable a destroyer’s engines to stop its retreat, target a Mothership’s fighter facility to prevent that class of reinforcements, or demolish the hyperspace module on an opponent’s carrier so their hit-and-run tactic becomes hit-and-die. Modular subsystems are absent from HW3.

Deserts of Kharak features veteran bonuses for individual units. Keeping ships alive makes them better over time. Gameplay effects give you a reason to be invested in the fate of your forces. DoK’s Motherships have a power-shunting system which allows the player to adjust their capabilities according to the situation. You can increase speed, armor, weapon damage, self-repair, or sensor range—but not all at once. This interlocking chain of trade-offs offers myriad interesting choices. Although they come from the same developer, neither of these systems made it to HW3.

Homeworld 3 brings one new idea to the table. Terrain or megastructures define every level (even multiplayer maps). The developers tout this as adding strategic layers, “using cover, setting ambushes, or funneling enemies through a choke point.” The trouble is it doesn’t work. Ships are completely stymied by the obstacles. The pathfinding just can’t handle it. There’s one mission that specifically tells you to use tunnels, but it’s much easier to ignore them; and another where you must use cover to succeed, but that’s only possible because of obvious blind spots. No competent enemy would arrange defenses that way.

Yes, I Am the Boss of You

HW3 units don’t do as they’re told. These crews are not fighting for their lives. They’re constantly doing dumb stuff that gets them killed. I’ve seen several reviews/comments that say they act drunk, but that’s too generous. You can usually tell what a drunk person is trying to do, even if they’re failing miserably. These pilots do shit that makes no sense.

Formations suck now. Ships prioritize staying in rigid position above following orders. A group of speedy fighters will slow down (sometimes stop) to turn in formation before continuing on their way. Frigates in formation wiggle uncertainly, firing one-fourth or one-fifth as often as they’re able because they’re so terrified of stepping out of line. Sometimes if you change a group’s formation during execution of a move or attack order, they’ll forget the order. When I told 17 frigates to assume the wall formation, they made three groups: eight on the left, one in the middle (!!), and eight on the right. I wanted a big wall, not two small walls and a gap. (It looked kinda like a bowtie.)

The game puts groups in formation even when you didn’t give the order (usually delta, the second-worst option). I selected a motley collection of ships and ordered them to move. They milled around for a bit to get and stay together, although that meant a significant delay in the faster ships’ arrival. When squadrons of fighters or corvettes dock for repairs, they forget their formation. No matter how many times you explicitly order “no formation,” some vessels in the group will eventually decide they know better. It doesn’t stick. You have to keep telling them.

Frigates and capital ships can no longer perform player-directed combat maneuvers, continuing to fire on target as they move to the new location. But they automatically float up or down to meet foes on the same plane (Star Trek rules), even though firing from above or below does more damage. In one mission, I had carefully positioned my ion frigates above the path of attackers, specifically to rain ion beams down on passing capital ships. The first time I ordered them to attack a carrier, what did they do? They drifted down to the same horizontal level, placing half the group behind a giant slab whence they could no longer hit the target.

Sometimes units do things for no reason at all. During a mission where the Mothership must remain concealed in crystal clouds and avoid enemy sensors, she decided to come out of hiding and move into sensor range while I was paying attention to fighting at the front, at which point the enemy warped in dozens of ships and I got rekt. I’ve had fighter squads and even frigate companies leave the fight and fly halfway across the level to line up neatly next to the Mothership. There is no command for this. I literally couldn’t do it if I tried.

I’m not interested in controlling a 220-vessel fleet if it means hand-holding every ship all the time. How many hands you think I got?

Campaign Story (SPOILERS Abound)

Our heroes, the Hiigarans, enjoy a golden age of peace and prosperity. Twenty years ago, Karan S’Jet (who was cybernetically integrated with the Mothership in the first two games) took a fleet on an exploration expedition and disappeared. Now a disturbance in the hyperspace gates has cut off huge swathes of the galaxy from the network. The Hiigarans construct a new Mothership, with Karan’s protégée Imogen S’Jet in control, and send her to investigate. She discovers that this is the work of the Incarnate Queen, another hyperspace navigator, who wants to use the power of the gate network to rule or destroy the entire galaxy.

I’m not going to lambaste the writers for telling their story or expanding Homeworld lore in a direction I don’t like, but I will take them to task for doing it badly. Hey y’all, SHOW, DON’T TELL.

We’re told that the Queen is wreaking havoc, but we never see that in the missions. She kills billions of people on dozens of worlds, which we learn after the fact, during a cinematic video of the main characters watching another video of what happened. (Yes, really. Game cinematics are reaction videos now.)

There’s no one in this universe except the heroes and the villain. Although the Queen threatens all spacefaring peoples, nobody else shows up to help defeat her. You never meet survivors of the cultures she destroyed. Incarnate soldiers don’t do anything interesting, let alone switch sides, because they’re all mind-controlled. No one suggests calling home to Hiigara for allies or reinforcements. The scale of conflict doesn’t fit.

The single genuinely emotional moment is finding Karan S’Jet and her Mothership. The music does most of the heavy lifting, with a little help from nostalgia.

Imogen makes a big deal about using subterfuge to convince the Queen that she wants to join up, a gambit to reach her base without fighting all her forces, but it goes nowhere. You have to destroy them all anyway, yet Imogen doesn’t drop the ruse.

At the end of the game, Karan and Imogen join hands with the Incarnate Queen and Karan takes her to Hyperspace Heaven. No! She has committed multiple genocides and never shows remorse. What the fuck?

War Games

War Games is Homeworld 3′s roguelike mode. Up to three players cooperate to fend off enemies while accomplishing randomized objectives. There are no Motherships. Each player gets one carrier that produces a limited subset of units. As they play, experience unlocks new fleet loadouts, analogous to new characters with different moves. During each run, players earn artifacts, which allow them to choose from three buff/debuff effects for one of their ship types for the rest of the run.

An endless stream of enemy forces warps in at scripted intervals. Again, there’s no way to undercut them by attacking resourcing, and no point in reconnaissance, because they jump in quite close, never giving time for preparation.

The developers bet all-in on War Games. All the planned post-release DLC is for this mode. For the life of me, I can’t figure out why they thought this was a good idea. Homeworld is known for the Mothership and large fleets; Neither is present here.

I played two rounds of this and I’m done with it forever.

Homeworld 3 Makes Me Sad

This game feels sludgy. For the reasons I explained exhaustively above, every battle turns into a hodgepodge. There’s no sense of distance or scale. It’s just a mosh pit where all ships get chewed up no matter how you micromanage them. It comes down to attrition. That satisfying feeling of solving a puzzle or outmaneuvering an opponent is gone.

Because nothing does its job well and the game resets formations and stances behind your back, most of the gameplay is busywork. It’s a chore to continuously build reinforcements, group units, reset their formation and stance, and reissue orders over and over until your ships obey.

Playing Homeworld 3, I feel frustrated and disappointed, as if I’ve been cheated out of something that should have been great.