Ithharr

At the time of writing its been roughly 25 years since the original homeworld came out. Its graphics are dated, its controls are clunky, its audio is crunchy. Even with those up front it is still the grandaddy of all space-based RTS games with an appreciable depth to it. A depth that was lost when HW1 was "Remastered" in homeworld 2's engine. The classic version of HW1 gearbox packages with the remastered collection is non-functional on modern machines. A different version will need to be acquired elsewhere.

Anyone saying DEI is a.) Full of hot air, B.) Not providing anything useful, and 3.) Blaming consultants, people whose suggestions are ignorable by contract. No, no, Homeworld 3 fails on its own merits without blaming consultants. We'll breakdown how it fails without needing to touch that. Gameplay - Gameplay suffers from poorly implemented mechanics/mechanics not functioning correctly. Examples - attack move does not work quite right (Units will attempt to complete the move and not shoot while moving.) Fixed minimum firing ranges - (Railgun, Ion Cannon, and Torpedo frigates (Especially torpedo frigates)) must be at a specific range from their targets before the unit will shoot otherwise these units get stuck in a loop trying to get into that range instead of firing. Ships seek out flat-planes to fire making it a fight to utilize them (Think battle fleet gothic engagements on this, it explains a lot of behaviors. Like not being able to meaningfully move & shoot/ attack move.) Ion Cannon Frigates have a bizarrely short range. The MOBA-ization of units (Everything unit has a cooldown ability that does incremental adjustments (moves slightly faster, shots do slightly more damage, ect) that are painfully dull. Bizarrely short time-to-kill for capital ships (Yes it gotten better since launch. No it's still not good.) Lacking a proper build queue. Lack of map diversity, maps small enough to negate needing exploration. - This is a small collection of problems I've personally had with HW3's mechanics. CGI & Story - The CGI & characters remind me of the Shrek movies - Over the top one-note/trait characters that can't be taken seriously as they're all Saturday morning cartoon caricatures that somehow manage to be the most boring thing in the background. This presents a tonal whiplash when coming from the rest of the series, even HW2's lackluster campaign, as it goes from "You're playing as a species / faction trying to survive, not as individual heroes," to "These two people are the story and here's the third wheel. They all have the personality of a soiled blanket complete with the odor." Going from grand scale space opera to a discount Telemundo soap opera about turbo-planetary-genocide/security blanket **** did not go over well. Gearbox, BBI, and executive interference - We'll add on the anti-consumer practices, Denuvo, Season Pass/Battle Pass & War Games only future development here. Denuvo is notorious for tanking game performance to the point of "Once it's cracked, the cracked version will play better than the official" being a common observation. The season pass/battle pass is reeks of desired recurrent monetization schemes and, bluntly speaking, eww. The war games mode being the entirety of the post-launch production roadmap is beyond disappointing. Wargames itself **** by with a "just ok" as a mode. It's unfortunately one with incredibly restrictive ship selection and HW3 plainly lacks the ship diversity to make a functional rougelike/roguelite out of it let alone have war games be the only source of replayability HW3 provides. More than a few folks have hypothisized that Gearbox wanted to hop onto the e-sports bandwagon with this especially considering how vile the EULA conditions are regarding content creation with HW3. If you are a fan of immersive space games, RTS's, or games with functional mechanics/stories - stay away.

The Good - It has all the elements in place to make it a fantastic game if the developers committed themselves to finishing it and not flushing out their microtransaction store before that. They could be on to something. With adding new combat animations (present animations are fairly static) and a good fleshing out of the NPC quests, weapons, and world events it has the potential to be truly a good game. The skill trees - I've found myself enjoying the these, building characters for very different **** can actually specialize which is a major improvement over this studios past games. Again this needs more fleshing out to be truly good and the rate at which you level needs to be toned way the hell down but it is a decent starting point. The NPC combat with the teleportation mechanic is actually interesting and outright horrifying. This is a massive step in the right direction (Case in point, if running in the subway while a surge is occurring on the surface... the horrors warped down into the subway because of the noise you make and they damn well try to kill you). The NPC's are actually pose a threat. Add a dozen + world events and another dozen monsters or so to the game, more weapons diversity (and animations) added, and it could be a very good STALKER-esque game. One of the more recent additions are the transformation potions, giving you a short (~2 minute) glimpse of how the monsters behave by letting you play as one. This has been a source of great amusement for me and terror for those on the receiving end. The Bad - The playerbase (initially) & Repititon - Before clan assignment you really are just some random schlub. Your life has utterly zero meaning or value outside of a of "loot pinyata." The good news is that generally clan members do not outright attack each other. There is also a problem of "A lack of things to do" at present. There need to be additional events added that force people to either work together to survive or that make the world more dangerous to all the survivors when they either do nothing or going for a cheap kill. - Needs more horror and more survival is the gist here. The Ugly - This is twofold, first the server load time. It is outright atrocious. It easily takes 5+ minutes for the server list to just load up. Secondly, the luggage - Sergy Titov & Hammerpoint interactive the creators of the engine and the mind behind The War Z/Infestation Survivor stories - They have a history of starting projects and never finishing them, moving on well before anything is actually finished. The engine in both Nether and Infestation Survivor Stories is dated and it shows especially in the realm of combat animations. This could be addressed but it has yet to be touched.