Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak is Homeworld, in a desert, on Kharak.

I’m not even being all that churlish by describing it that way. I went into this expecting a desert-set RTS with a strong Homeworld flavouring. What I got, and what ended up being a bit of a surprise, was something that transplanted the classic Homeworld space-based gameplay down onto a planetary surface. And I mean literally transplanted, word-for-word and concept-for-concept, almost to the point of absurdity in places. You don’t have an army, you have a fleet. The basic minigun-equipped LAV unit is referred to as a “Strike craft” by the fleet personnel, and function exactly like fighters would in a real Homeworld game. Your biggest units are called cruisers rather than crawlers or tanks or whatever. The sensor manager returns, with identical icons for denoting fighters, frigates and capital ships. There’s a main mothership unit that builds all of your stuff, from which you can send salvage craft out to gather RUs from resource points scattered across the map. The list goes on and on, but make no mistake: this game is Homeworld, just with the third dimension stripped out.

Not that I think that’s a bad idea. The original Homeworld games were lauded more for their setting, atmosphere and combat mechanics than they were their use of the third dimension. I can’t remember many levels that took great advantage of the added Z axis, and interacting with it yourself by trying to issue move orders above or below your units’ current position was always a bit awkward. It seems a bit weird to be saying that making Homeworld two-dimensional makes it better, and I don’t necessarily think that it does, but it’s definitely different, not to mention much more appropriate for the sort of tightly-focused game Deserts of Kharak is. There’s an enforced supply cap restricting the number of units you can build that starts out low and gradually increases as the campaign wears on, so for the first 6-7 missions you’re tooling around with no more than fifty units plus your command carrier – and most of those are the fighter-esque LAVs. This means you gain a healthy appreciation for the innovations Deserts does bring to the Homeworld formula: the use of tactics, terrain, positioning and special abilities to bring the pain down on the overwhelming enemy forces without losing too many of your own. That sense of attrition has always been part of Homeworld; a key feature of the series is that your fleet and your mined resources persists from mission to mission, which promotes a keen sense of efficiency on the part of the player, and something that is especially heightened in Deserts of Kharak thanks to the comparatively small set of assets you have to play with.

I should back this up a little bit, though. Deserts is set on the Homeworld prison planet of Kharak shortly after its inhabitants achieve basic spaceflight, and follows the search for the shipwreck containing the hyperspace core (here referred to as the Primary Anomaly) that kicks off the events of Homeworld 1. Said shipwreck is located in the middle of the inhospitable planet-spanning desert, so the pole-dwelling Northern Coalition outfit and dispatch an expedition force centered around a huge aircraft carrier on tank treads called the Kapisi. Unfortunately the inhabitants of the desert — the religious Gaalsien, who see spaceflight as a mortal sin that will bring destruction down on Kharak¹ — don’t take tremendously kindly to any of this and launch an all-out war against the North, which means that the Kapisi now has to battle hordes of bloodthirsty desert warriors on their way to the Anomaly.

The plot is yet another way in which Deserts is basically Homeworld all over again. You’re trying to get to a far away destination through desolate, hostile territory populated by enemies that vastly outnumber you. The Kapisi is still fitting out as it starts its journey into the desert, just as the Homeworld Mothership was, which provides an excuse for drip-feeding new units and research as new systems come online. The one big structural departure is that your Gaalsien opponents aren’t quite the strict mirror image of you that the Taiidan were in Homeworld; they have a few of the same basic units but the Gaalsien variants invariably trade off durability for speed, as befits their background as hit-and-run desert raiders. These differences are explained away as the Gaalsien exploiting the numerous “alien” shipwrecks littering the desert and reverse-engineering their technology, and that’s something that you can do too via the new special abilities.

Every unit now has at least one special ability of some sort, as befits this slightly more conventional style of RTS that Homeworld has become. Some of them are activated via a hotkey and some of them are passive, but all of them are incredibly useful. This might be down to the small unit roster (3 basic units, 3 cruiser units, 3 support units, 3 types of aircraft), however I found it really impressive that I couldn’t find a single duff one amongst them and that they all got used to greater or lesser degrees during my campaign. The LAV boost got me out of more tight jams than I care to remember, zooming across the battlefield to the flank I’d carelessly left open to buy time with their lives while my heftier units trundled over there, or evacuating from combat after assassinating a key soft target. The AAV smoke cloud ability is invaluable for fighting enemy railguns, which appear in large groups of 5-8 and will chew you up if they have any kind of line of sight. The Support Cruiser gets possibly the best abilities of the lot, with a set of passive repair beams (upgradable to have AOE), anti-air missiles and EMP rounds that temporarily disable anything they hit; I had five of these things mixed in with my cruiser group towards the end of the game because they were so damn useful. It’s the humble Salvager’s special abilities that come in useful for breaking up those precious shipwrecks, though, as it can deploy manually-detonated TNT to smash them open. This scatters precious resources over the surrounding area for your salvagers to collect, but also — occasionally — Artifacts that you then take back to a Support Cruiser or the Kapisi to get a passive upgrade of some sort.

I was a little bit disappointed that the Artifact upgrades were rather dull compared to the special abilities unlocked through conventional research. Don’t get me wrong, they are useful, but they do boring-yet-invaluable stuff like making your units cheaper or lowering their supply cost. I guess that because picking them up is entirely optional (and in a lot of cases very risky, as it involves an unnecessary jaunt into enemy territory) the developers didn’t want to lock off any of the really cool stuff and instead relegated them to having useful passive advantages that you could nevertheless probably survive without. At least the search for these Artifacts results in you never really getting resource-locked; my view is probably biased since I’m very familiar with how Homeworld works and how critical having a decent stockpile of resources is, but even though I erred on the side of caution and didn’t waste time mining out every single node I still ended up holding on to a huge surplus of raw materials until the very last mission of the campaign.

The campaign itself starts off really strongly, when everything is still limited in scope and Deserts has yet to lose that new-game shine. The focus on relatively small-scale engagements really helped things here, I think; for much of the early game you only have access to the three basic types of combat unit – LAVs, armoured vehicles and railguns — plus airstrikes from your Carrier (you build fighters like any other unit, but they’re called for a single limited attack much like the aircraft from Airland Battle or the Orcas from C&C) and the focus is very much on that clever positioning and use of abilities that I mentioned earlier. The terrain is made of up of the typical sand dunes you’d expect from a desert environment, but an interesting thing about Deserts is that there’s no such thing as “standard” ground level; those dunes constantly undulate up and down just as you’d expect a real desert to, and this makes taking advantage of the high ground mechanic – whereby high ground units get big passive bonuses when fighting enemies at a lower elevation than them — a little more interesting than it would be otherwise as you’re constantly jockeying for the best position to take advantage of it. Deserts is at its best when you have those small tracked/wheeled units screaming about the desert landscape, like it’s Homeworld crossed with Mad Max. The missions are relatively well-designed in such a way that each unit type can make a valuable contribution to the fray, and you can even think about getting your carrier involved too, as it is now an absolute beast in combat with the correct power settings.

Sadly it doesn’t last. I suppose it’s inevitable given that it’s such a literal one-to-one translation in many ways, but Deserts has the same problem as Homeworld in that once you unlock capital ships you render all smaller craft pretty much redundant. Why would I continue to piss about with a formation of LAVs or AAVs when a pair of Assault Cruisers has more firepower than twenty smaller vehicles put together? The game turns from the interesting tactical challenges of the early game to just blobbing things with a group of Battlecruisers, Assault Cruisers and Support Cruisers, and it’s unfortunate that this comes at roughly the same point as the mission design takes a noticeable dip in quality. The enemy AI is pretty dodgy at the best of times and it’s only because it spawns these preset formations of small craft that it seems in any way balanced at all, but once you give it cruisers any semblance of intent goes out the window. Take the penultimate mission, for example, which involves fighting a huge mess of enemy units that are just driving around randomly at the bottom of a crater. They make no real attempt to take you on en masse, but because there are so many of them there’s no really clever way to take them about without taking significant losses. This goes against all of the good points I mentioned earlier; there’s no tactics or smart use of abilities involved anymore and no real possibility of preserving forces in an intelligent way, and instead you’re just smashing your hard units into their hard units and hoping they die before you do.

I think this is the point where a space-based Homeworld has a definite advantage over its ground-based offspring; two groups of capital ships beating the shit out of each other may not have been particularly taxing as a gameplay concept, but it was spectacular to watch. Deserts is a good looking game in an understated sort of way, but its cruiser vehicles lack the elegance of design and the ion cannons of the Destroyer or the Heavy Cruiser of Homeworld and its cruiser vs cruiser engagements are ultimately no more entertaining than a tank rush in C&C. They’re about as awkward too, as the size of the cruisers mean Deserts’ significant issues with pathfinding are rudely brought to the fore. At least in 3D space a Destroyer couldn’t run into any obstacles and could path around other ships okay; here they get stuck doing fifteen point turns around small terrain features and each other, and have a nasty tendency to cluster up in exactly the sort of way that makes them terrifically vulnerable to enemy artillery/cruise missile strikes. If the early game has been specifically designed to make the most of Deserts’ good points, then the last 3-4 missions of the campaign show up its bad ones very effectively by boiling the game down to its most unpleasant elements.

That’s a huge shame, because I was very on-side for Deserts of Kharak during the first five hours I was playing it. It did a lot right, and despite copying so many concepts from Homeworld it introduced enough of its own to start building its own identity, especially since the atmosphere and sound design are almost as good as that of the original games. This made it all the more disappointing that it fell down so badly during the closing missions; the quality of everything seemed to dip rather noticeably and it was a definite chore to get through the last two hours of the game. It doesn’t feel anywhere near as polished as the first two-thirds, it closes things off with a very perfunctory ending that doesn’t do justice to the rest of the game’s efforts at world-building, and just generally feels like it was rushed to get it out the door for whatever reason. Also, while I do feel that Deserts does understand what makes Homeworld Homeworld, it doesn’t have anywhere near the same bleak beauty that was such a selling point for the original series. It definitely felt like there was something missing the whole time I was playing it, and I think all of that together knocks it down from my initial opinion of “Good” to a more qualified “Average with some good points”. Do buy it if you like Homeworld or are interested in seeing how it transitions to 2D, but otherwise I wouldn’t exactly rush to pick it up.

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The Homeworld Remastered Collection is a packaged rerelease of space strategy classics Homeworld and Homeworld 2. I didn’t like Homeworld 2 the first time around, and so this is largely going to be a review of the remastered version of the first Homeworld.

Gearbox strikes again.

I dunno, my saying that does seem slightly unfair. Your typical rerelease of an older game won’t go to the effort that Homeworld Remastered does. It’ll just tweak the game so that it works on modern operating systems at modern resolutions, stick an “HD” on the end of the title, and then push itself out onto Steam and other digital storefronts, happy in the knowledge that it’s bringing in maximal profit for minimal outlay through the sheer power of nostalgia. As you can probably tell, I’ve acquired a rather jaded view of this whole business of selling old rope for money, and so Homeworld Remastered being released in its current state comes off as all the more disappointing, since for the first ten minutes I played it it seemed like it might be the one game to break that mould.

With Homeworld Remastered Gearbox have made a real attempt at making something worth buying, you see. Instead of sharpening all the textures up a bit and then calling it a day they’ve gone to extreme lengths to make this Remastered version look like it’s something that has a legitimate reason to be released in the glorious space-year 2015. The game has received a complete graphical facelift. Everything from the ships to the skyboxes to the beam effects has been overhauled and upgraded, to the point where Homeworld Remastered looks better than 90% of AAA games you’re likely to play this year.  The stylised, hand-drawn cinematics and the voiceovers that accompany them – such an integral part of the flavour and feel of the Homeworld universe – have been redone with the original actors, and even the music’s been resampled at a higher bitrate from the original recordings. All of this marks Homeworld Remastered out as something unique: you don’t expend this amount of time and resources on a rerelease of a series that’s over a decade old unless you have a genuine passion for it. It’s a real labour of love, and it shows. It looks incredible. It sounds incredible.

It is also, alas, totally broken.

In recent years Gearbox have acquired something of a reputation for pushing out cynically licenced games that are… how can I put this… somewhat technically challenged in order to make a quick buck on the strength of their licenced property. Homeworld absolutely doesn’t deserve to be lumped in with the likes of Duke Nukem Reloaded and Colonial Marines, but there’s no escaping the fact that it’s just as bug-ridden as either of those games were at launch, and that these bugs are things that did not exist in the “classic” version of Homeworld. They’ve been introduced during the game’s graphical upgrade, and the reasons for this become apparent once you do a little reading into the under-the-hood retooling Gearbox did in order to make that upgrade possible in the first place: the entirety of Homeworld has been ported lock, stock and barrel into the Homeworld 2 engine so that they only had to overhaul one game engine instead of two.

This is the sort of thing that sounds like a good idea from a development point of view. Homeworld 2 is the more recent game. It’ll be easier to make the needed changes in that engine.  And they’re basically the same game anyway, right? It’s not like Homeworld 2 was a radical change in direction for the series; it had many of the same ships shooting the same guns in a slightly more high-definition interface. Surely the second game’s engine isn’t going to be such a bad fit for Homeworld?

That’s what you’d think, anyway. And that’s clearly what Gearbox thought. Unfortunately for them (and for me), the second Homeworld did some seemingly-subtle mechanical streamlining that renders its engine an extremely bad fit. Take fighters, for example. Fighters in Homeworld 2 were no longer built individually; they were built as a permanently grouped fighter wing and behaved as a permanently grouped fighter wing. The Homeworld 2 engine has no analogue for the grouped fighter behaviour of the first Homeworld, where fighters would maintain formation in a dogfight and would pivot to face a capital ship as they were doing a drive-by strafing run a la Babylon 5/Battlestar Galactica, because Homeworld 2 doesn’t have a concept of the fighter as a single entity. The best it can do is to treat a single fighter as it would a lumped squadron; it’ll maintain formation with other fighters until they make contact with the enemy, and then the formation dissolves into a huge blobby mess as the squadron behaviour takes over and it’s every fighter for itself¹.

This is half of why fighters in Homeworld Remastered are so useless. The other half is to do with how Homeworld 2 models weapons fire via a pure chance-to-hit system. This, again, is very different from how the first Homeworld did it – my memory on this is a little fuzzy, but Homeworld 1 certainly gave the appearance of modelling individual projectiles and the path they took through space. If your projectile hit an enemy ship it took damage. Homeworld 1’s system made certain formations very effective, as your ships were in firing positions that were flat-out better as they allowed you to concentrate fire. It also made the Evasive fighter behaviour worthwhile; throwing in a group of fast Scouts in Evasive to distract the enemy was a legitimate tactic. None of this works any more in the Remastered edition, however, and it’s all thanks to the chance to hit rolls: it doesn’t matter where your fighter is or how fast it’s moving, all that matters is whether the thing shooting at it makes its CtH roll. If it does, you’ve got a dead fighter. As for shooting at other things, since most of the power of fighters was in their movement and positioning they’ve ended up being pretty devastatingly crippled in this new incarnation.

That’s just the most egregious example of something that worked well in Homeworld being totally broken by the transition to the Homeworld 2 engine. There are plenty of others, such as the game not being particularly sure if you’re allowed to dock your ships with carriers/the mothership any more. I couldn’t do it, but the AI apparently could, which lead to a comical moment when I captured the enemy carrier in mission 5, and after my engineers had hurriedly repainted it in my colours it evicted two whole squadrons of enemy fighters that had been lurking inside that I then had to kill. Because they’ve drastically altered the balance of the game through trying to fit the square peg of Homeworld into the round hole of the Homeworld 2 engine, parts of the campaign are now insultingly easy while others are even harder than when I went through them the first time². There’s even – hnnnng – autoscaling of the number of ships you face based on the size of the fleet you bring into the mission, which is the part of Homeworld 2 that I hated the most.

And then there’s the stuff that’s flat out bugged. The bugs I have encountered include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Resourcers disappearing into thin air. This has happened twice, and on both occasions the resourcers were guarded by a squadron of fighters behind my mothership well away from any battle lines. I heard no “We’re under attack!” chatter, and neither did anything show up on the sensor map. One moment the resourcers were there, and when I looked back they had vanished.

• Salvage not working properly. In mission 3 you’re asked to salvage an assault frigate as one of the mission objectives. I duly sent my salvage corvettes in to capture it, but the assault frigate remained stubbornly immobile once they’d attached themselves to the hull. I checked its stats: its movement value had set itself to minus 2 billion³. I had to restart the mission to get it to work properly. Later on I tried to salvage some resourcers only to have to exact same thing happen, so it wasn’t an isolated incident.

• The game not letting me use the carrier I captured in mission 5 as an actual place where I could build ships. I couldn’t select it in the new drop-down build interface, and so I ended up telling it to follow my resourcers around so that they could use it as a drop-off point, since this was all it was good for.

• Triggers not firing properly. The worst example of this was the thing that made me stop playing Homeworld Remastered: on mission 9 you have to kill a ghost ship that projects a field that takes over any capital ships that wander too close. The idea is that you’re supposed to use fighters and bombers to take it out, so I duly lured its protecting fleet away with some long-range shots from my destroyers and sent in the bombers – who proceeded to bathe it in plasma fire for twenty minutes without making so much as a dent. As far as I could tell the ship had an invulnerable flag that wasn’t turned off until a certain cutscene had happened – and despite reloading the mission twice I couldn’t get it to trigger, so I couldn’t progress any further into the game. Sucks to be me, I guess.

My experience with this remastered edition of Homeworld 1 has ended up being fairly abject, then. The irony was that I never thought that much of Homeworld 1 as a game; its visuals were stunning (at the time) and its story and atmosphere were engaging, but the actual gameplay always came across to me as awkward and stilted.  After playing this remake, though, and seeing just how possible it is to thoroughly stuff it up, I’ve come away with a new appreciation for all the things Relic got right that I didn’t notice until I saw a version of the game that didn’t have them. As I said before I think Gearbox really do care about the Homeworld series and they’ll hopefully put in the hours required to fix the game, or at least patch out the worst of the bugs. At the moment, though, I’d have to warn you not to buy this collection hoping to play through an updated version of Homeworld 1, as I did. You’ll only end up disappointed.

As for the rest of the collection, it’s actually pretty good news. Despite my deep and abiding hatred for it I played several missions of Homeworld 2 to see if that had any bugs, but that at least seemed to work flawlessly. Which is unsurprising, really; at the very least I’d expect Homeworld 2 to work in an overhauled version of its own engine.  The collection also helpfully comes bundled with the original versions of Homeworld and Homeworld 2, and it’s good to have those games available via a digital distribution channel. They still work pretty good on Windows 7, even – I played Homeworld Classic for an hour to confirm things worked the way I remembered and I wasn’t just imagining half of these bugs, with no problems beside the odd bit of stuttering and an odd aspect ratio. The only remaining sore point is the sad absence of Homeworld: Cataclysm (by far the best Homeworld game)  for which the source code has reportedly been lost.  As a whole, the Homeworld Remastered Collection is a very strong package. Just so long as you like Homeworld 2.

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