izigame.me

I fell in love with this series as a kid, and kept in my heart for years. I loved all the original games and adored the Deserts of Kharak spin-off. I was the kind of fan that checked the development of HW3 weekly for years.
About 4 hours into the campaign, I put the game down never to touch it again. Months go by, and I never felt any desire to return.
This game has... nothing. It went from the feeling of ancient legend meets war drama, to how I imagine a modern Disney film about the navy would play out, brought to you by the animators of WISH.
The core mechanics are fundamentally unchanged from the original games, but with a substantially greater sense of float and delay between giving your orders and having them be followed. Further, the strategy element has drifted substantially in focus. The only way I can explain it is that in HW1 and HW2 your units felt like they mattered, in HW3 you will be micromanaging the death out of your economy because the game demands an endless stream of chaff sacrifices who ultimately won't do much but die. The squad mechanics of HW2 were superior to this in that it let you feel like you had a substantial number of small vessels in play without making you have to individually command and replace each lost unit one at a time.
I wanted this game to succeed, SO bad. Maybe if they'd had someone else write the dialogue it would have turned out different.
Here's a list of what credit I can give:
-Superstructures were a cool idea.
-I liked the new mothership design.
-The backgrounds, ost, and models are all up to snuff and have a great ambient feel.
-Way more unique campaign missions.
Here's a list of my gripes:
-The unique campaign missions are not done super well.
-The grand maps make ships feel slower rather than making the maps feel bigger.
-The dialogue is SO bad. Even the trailer had lines that amounted to "We should act without fear, because even though I don't know what I'm doing, who would follow someone who has no idea what they're doing?" played off as inspiring rather than ironic or grim.
-The delivery makes certain ideas really cheesy. The idea of your mothership commander intimately feeling each death due to cybernetic fleet integration is a cool concept. The fact that she whines for a couple minutes and then gets over it is not so cool. It should either have been a small but poignant moment of stoicism against a grim reality, or an ongoing plot of trauma. I don't even know how to describe what it ended up being. Campy?
-The main villain looks like a disney princess and has the facial expressions of a Moana character. This is not how I want my grim sci-fi being portrayed. Cutscenes are fine, but going from grim, black and white photo-realism in HW2 to this artsy, almost cute style made my jaw hit the floor when the villain appeared. What were they thinking?! If they had made the villain look like some aged crone wired into her ship, I think half my issues would go away. The current design looks like she would be a background jedi apprentice from the Clone Wars animated cartoon. Character design is a form of communication, you can't just put random people into random roles.
-While I appreciate the attempt to make in-universe slang a thing, each character who says "Sands and sinners!" as an expletive sounds like they have never said the phrase before in their life and are reading it for the first time like it's a catch-phrase from a comic book. "Sands and Sinners, Batman!" is the energy.
-The new ship designs are just... alright. Compared to their counterparts from HW1 and HW2, they are an outright disappointment. They typically look less like real ships, and don't have any real character. The Taiidan of HW1 felt harsh and imposing but old, less like a wonder and more like a relic- fitting for a powerful empire long past its shelf life. The Hiigarans of HW2 had real-life navy and airforce looking craft, giving it the feel of a modern military taken to the space age. The Hiigarans of HW3, while looking okay, just don't have any kind of discernible theme beyond being space-age space craft, which is a let down.
-The game, plot, and characters are just tone deaf to their own context. There's nothing wrong with candid, emotional moments, but they shouldn't be happening mid-firefight on the bridge of a war vessel. The cut-scenes desperately needed more cantina/personal quarters scenes if it wanted these "deeper" characters to work. If you want me to care about the commander guy, give him literally anything to do that isn't cheesy speeches. Give him a picture of his kid to look at, or a scene of him overlooking the empty seats at the mess hall. ANYTHING. They made a story that hinges on its characters without really making ANY characters.
Really, my ultimate comment on this game is: What a let down. If they make a HW4, I pray it will figure out its identity before committing.