Homeworld 2
Rating:  -
Homeworld 2 is an extraordinary game. Not quite as great as its legendary predecessor, but still tons of fun for anyone who enjoys games that are best described as 'epic'. In particular, if you are a sci-fi fan you absolutely MUST buy this game. You will not be disappointed.
Much has been said about the missions being hard. Yes, they certainly are! Harder than Homeworld 1, and harder than the missions in most strategy games. However, they are not THAT hard. I personally found Homeworld 2 easier than Starcraft. I am just a casual gamer, and I play about two games a year on average, yet I still managed to complete all missions in Homeworld 2 without getting stuck or frustrated at any point. I have no secret, other than the fact that I occasionally made use of the PAUSE button. Feeling overwhelmed by the fast-paced action? Pause it! Take a look around, admire the gorgeous graphics, and observe the enemy ships at your leisure. I am amazed that most people who criticized this game do not appear to have thought of pausing the action during those difficult missions they were having such trouble with (especially the person who complained that there are too many commands you need to give with your mouse). I won't even comment on the complaint that the saved games should be ordered differently.
The one flaw I found in Homeworld 2, and which sets it below the standard of its predecessor, is the anti-climactic ending. You feel like you're about to discover a great secret, the identity of Sajuuk, but then the answer turns out to be rather mundane (and, strangely, the characters don't seem to be the least bit surprised - as if they knew it all along).
Yet Homeworld 2 is clearly less oriented on the singleplayer missions and much more focused on custom battles and multiplayer than Homeworld 1. I found myself playing custom battles more than I played the missions. I particularly liked the fact that you can customize the look of your fleet - not only can you pick any shades of color for your ships, but you can also design your own fleet logo. A nice touch.
Well, I think I'll stop here. Other reviewers have already described the addictive gameplay and the stunning graphics. Homeworld 2 is an immersive game - it is for those gamers who do not merely want to shoot up random enemies, and wish to feel transported into another world.
Rating:  -
This game is quite fun, but it often has problems starting up due to conflicts with the emualtion software on most computers. Once you get it working, however, it's awesome.
Rating:  -
I picked up this game, borer with the games I had. I had heard good things about Homeworld 1 and, being a fan of RTS game, thought this would be good for the price. The main campaign is set in outerspace. Control the mothership and fleet of the Higaaran empire, whos trying to get a hold of some artifacts to control a giant ancient dreadnaught. The enemy is an evil guy bent on the same goal but for nefarious purposes. The graphics are amazing. Its fully 3D, you can zoom in and out, rotate, get right up next to ships... stuff like that. Fun game, but a lot of it is just get as much ore as you can and build the bigget baddest ships you can. I found the need for stratagy somewhat lacking. I also beat the game in about a week. there are 14 levels in the main game. There is also a Player VS CPU game which is just a skirmish between you and up to 7 opponants. You can play as either the Higaaran or the Vagyr. You can ally with CPUs and set their difficult from easy to expert. In my opinion the Player VS CPU games are the most fun.
Althought this game is beautiful to look at, and exciting for a while, there is not much variation in how to play the game. Same units every time, only one resource, gets boring quickly. So in conclusion, its a fun game, for a while, and for the money. I still hold out that original Total Annihilation was the best RTS ever made.
Rating: -
(This is for Homeworld 2 version 1.1... That's including the most recent patch.)
First, let me say that I've played and completed both Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm, and I found the first extremely enjoyable and engrossing (though somewhat frustrating), and the second just mostly frustrating.
This game was somewhere inbetween.
I agree with reviewers that said that the storyline of this game was weak. It doesn't make much of sense, and it leads to many missions that are almost carbon copies of the original Homeworld (especially the first few missions!) I'm not sure it fits into the series storyline, either.
Also, the game felt extremely rushed. There's barely time to breathe between the objectives that the game gives you. You can't neglect the objectives, either, because if you do, you might find yourself on the wrong side of overwhemling force. After the last objective has been achieved, you automatically collect all remaining resources and hyperspace jump whether you want to or not, and you're on to the next mission. I know why the devs did this, because players in the original Homeworld (and I think Cataclysm as well) would spend hours collecting resources after each mission, but somehow having all that done for you just felt like it was moving the game *way too fast*. In addition, while you auto-collect all the resources in the area, meaning that you never have a shortage, you don't have time to rebuild or take stock. This means that, while you might win the current mission, you'll be horribly under-powered for the next mission, and also unprepared with your groupings, and since many missions start out very quickly this can be a BIG PROBLEM. You have to make sure and keep an eye on what you're building and what ships are damaged so that you can be at full, or close to full strength when the missions ends. There might be an option to turn off the auto-jump, but the game went by so fast on my first run through that I never had a chance to look!
Now, don't get me wrong, the rushing didn't make the game any more difficult. Quite on the contrary, I found Homeworld 2 to be a bit easier than the original. I completed it in about 8 hours of total play time, while the original took at least several days (and sleepless nights). But, that's also a problem, because it was over too fast!
Cut scenes also come at an annoying rate and interrupt you when you're trying to control the action, but you can't interrupt them because you might miss something important (like the location of an objective). In order to get around this sometimes I found myself just watching some cut-scenes, and then reloading to an autosave before the cut-scenes and skipping them. This was a problem in the original Homeworld as well, but somehow I didn't find it nearly as annoying as I did in Homeworld 2.
There were some things that I liked about Homeworld 2, at least in theory. I liked that you could upgrade your current ship designs. The only problem with this is that you never really see the results. Do all your ships auto-upgrade? Did it make a difference? Where do I see what benefit it had? Was it worth the research or extra resources or time spent?
I liked that fighters and corvettes had a natural place in the fighting. In the original, I found myself neglecting my fighters and corvettes (my corvettes especially, which seemed to be waste of resources). In this game, however, I found that their role was much more prominent. Bombers could effectively take out frigates, and were almost indestructable if the frigates weren't escorted by gun-ships or interceptors. Interceptors, on the other hand, were required to protect the bombers from other interceptors, and to draw gun-ship fire away. Corvettes (except for the mine layer corvette, which I managed never to have to build for any mission at all) I also found to be very powerful, and I would often use them as my preferred strike-craft defense when I sent in my own capital or super-capital ships.
However, frigates seemed to have their role deemphasized. Most of the time I found myself using frigates to draw fire as my capital and super-capital ships were coming around and my bombers and gun-ships (which were very effective at harassing enemy capital and super-capital ships) made their way to the battle. I'd almost always lose my entire line of frigates in the process (and I normally ran with frigate formations of between 14 and 18 ships).
Also, some frigates were almost completely useless except when they were worked into a mission. These were specifically marine frigates and defense frigates. Capturing ships was something I almost never had the time to do (the enemy ships either went down too quickly, or the marine frigates would just be canon fodder going in), and the defense field of the defense field frigate required that you turn it on every time you wanted to use it, and it only lasted a few seconds each time. That's way, way too much micromanagement for me. Plus, the speed at which missions progressed made it difficult to work these two special frigates into the tactical picture.
I liked some of aspects of the redesigned interface. The build and research screens still let you see the battle. Being able to click on an object to go there, or to quickly issue a move command to empty space was excellent. Having groups of fighters and strike craft rather than individual fighters and strike craft made it *much* easier for me to manage. Having the selected craft appear in the bottom command area thing was excellent as well, as it gave me an at-a-glance look at how they were doing damage-wise.
Some aspects weren't so great, though, for instance the large, iconic command buttons. Some of them made sense to me, some of them didn't. In the end the buttons didn't matter much, because I used hotkeys almost exclusively and had little time to even consider the buttons. This was the case for most of the interface options that I might not have liked. Sure, I might not have liked them, but I never really had the opportunity to find out since I never used them.
There were some things about the game that I found perplexing. For instance, in the tutorial they give you a carrier with a cloaking device... But in the single player mission line, you never encounter cloaking technology! The enemy might have been using it, in retrospec, but it made almost no difference at all. Why have cloaking technology in the game if it's going to make no difference? Also, you could, in theory, capture ships, but why would you want to? It was safer, easier, and more resource-effective to just pre-build replacement ships. Plus, not having to have a fleet of marine frigates on hand freed up slots for actual damage dealing ships. You couldn't "overload" your fleet population like you could in the original either (at least, I don't think you could, maybe I'm wrong here), and captured ships really didn't have any new and exciting capabilities to them (at least nothing that made a difference), so where's the incentive? I remember in the original I lived and died by what ships I could capture. I'd max out my frigate count and then capture ion arrays (which were awful ships, but then, you didn't feel so bad when you lost them) and multi-beam frigates (which were very powerful, if a bit dangerous to your own friendly ships). In this game, there's just no point in it. Also, you could attack sub-systems on enemy capital and super-capital ships, but, again, why? Sure, you could destroy the fighter production capability of a carrier, but they'd just rebuild that subsystem so quickly that you might as well have never bothered with the subsystem and just blown appart the vessel itself. I remember one mission where I was confronted with several carriers, and was trying to stop them from building additional strike craft, so I destroyed the production facility on the first carrier, and moved on to the second, and by the time the second carrier had it's production facility destroyed, the first had rebuilt its own and had already completed two squadrons of strike craft. DOH! Should have just destroyed the carrier, and after I reloaded, that's just what I did. Much easier.
In summary, this game was, in a few ways, an improvement on the original. I think that some aspects of the game-play are excellent. However, the thing that I took away from this game most was: "What, that's all there is?"
Now, it might be better for player vs. player, but I haven't tried that. For people looking for a good single-player experience, however, I recommend going with the original Homeworld, or with a different game entirely.
Rating:  -
I have now purchased this game twice and been completely unable to get it to run properly off of CD or fully installed. I have a top-of-the-line gaming system.
First disc was actually flawed and would not install at all - second purchase installed and then would not start.
Even the patch download was flawed and had to be installed twice - it still does not play - and i will now return 2 full copies without ever playing the game.
Support for this game is non-existent and you will receive no help at all from the company website. The do give you your money back, but save time and just don't buy it - and read up on any of their products before trusting Vivendi.
Total waste of money and time.
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