izigame.me

I cannot tell you how excited I was to finally get to play a new Homeworld game, sadly my excitement turned into disappointment quickly.
The good (in no order):
Graphics are great,
Sound is great,
Music is great.
Using space terrain for cover and ambushes is good, but not the best.
The bad:
No subsystems on ships anymore. While I can understand that this is a callback to the original Homeworld, it limits gameplay choices and customization options. In Homeworld 2, you could, for instance, customize a carrier for resource operations or just to harass the enemy with a carrier that had fighter and corvette production facilities. This customization on ships is gone now. Shame.
Pathfinding is just bad. Ships hold formation no matter what. When "terrain" is below the ships, or at least near them, most capital ships tend to "hug the ground". This is mostly visible in the last few missions.
Why can't we place turrets in space? Why do they need to stick to something?
Lack of ship variety --> If you give us less ships, the you could at least give us the ability to customize them via subsystems.
Getting a specific ship class (say Torpedo frigates) used to have meaning and impact on the game, and was more or less tied to the story (well got to this later), now you just...get them.. Same for other classes, they just become magically available. The progression from fighters to battle cruisers is not eventful. Getting a battle cruiser in H1 or H2 was meaningful, now it is not.
Why are destroyers and battle cruisers good against everything???? Why? How? All ships are good and bad against something. Fighters against bombers, bombers against capital ships, capital ships against capital ships and frigates, etc...I feels like there is no logic here.
Why oh why, does every ship have an alt fire mode with a cooldown that you, the player, need to activate every X amount of seconds?? This is not SC2 or some MOBA game, where the player with the most actions per minute wins.
Camera is awful, no matter which controls you use, modern or legacy. Awful.
Why is the Mothership among the fastest ships in the fleet??? There was a mission in HW2 where it nearly took about 20 min to move the Mothership across a small map to complete the mission. With the Mothership in HW3 you could probably do that in less that 2 min with the rest of the fleet arriving 10 behind.
There is probably more bad, but lets skip to the god-awful.
Story is god-awful. Who wrote this? Did anyone read the script before making a campaign? Who approved the script thinking it is any good? Because it is not, it's bad. Homeworld 2's story is, compared to this, worthy of all the accolades. Sharknado is Oscar worthy compared to this. While I do not mind, that the story is more focused on individual characters, they are all badly written.
The motivations for the main villain are less complex than a Sunday morning episode of Paw Patrol.
Why does it seem like Intel has authority over Fleet command in the story???
The story of Homeworld is story about a people finding their origins and going beyond, but told through the voices in the game; Fleet command, Intel, The Bentusi, The Taiidan, even the villains. There is no grand story here, its just..I don't know what to call it.
Animations in the cutscenes are bad. They could have at least kept that the same style as in HW1, HW2 or DoK. I might have been a bit more forgiving if they did at least that in the game.
Maps are small, no, they are tiny compared to HW1 and HW2. They are also cluttered. While I appreciate space terrain and using it as cover, it is meaningless if maps are tiny.
There is no strategy in this game, which is a bit weird, since I know it is suppose to be a 3D strategy game in space. You build ships as quickly as you can (basically build spam) and send them to spot X where they battle fleet Y for a hopeful outcome of Z, as in ZZZzzzzzzz. As some have pointed out: you send your blob of ships to fight another blob of ships and repeat. While trying to hit that button to active alt fire mode hoping it will mean something. Again, this is not SC2 or a MOBA game, where the players the most actions per minute have the greatest chance of victory.
Future DLCs are all about Wargames. WHY? If the game is kept in this state Wargames will become meaningless. Skip the Wargames DLCs and improve the base game.
I own the original CDs of Homeworld 1 and Homeworld 2, I own Deserts of Kharak. I skipped school to play Homeworld 2 when I bought it. I wanted to love this game so so soooo much, but I can't. I hope it can be fixed, or improved.
There is a great game somewhere in Homeworld 3, but right now, I can't see it and can't find it. I hope the devs will make it that I and others like me can.