homeworld remastered collection gameplay

HOMEWORLD REMASTERED COLLECTION GAMEPLAY SOFTWARE
HOMEWORLD REMASTERED COLLECTION GAMEPLAY PC

Ship models may have higher polygon counts and improved textures but it’s the original visual design that steals the show, brought to life in a light show of searing plasma bolts, ion beams and exploding capital ships.Īs spectacular and exemplary a conversion as it may be, Homeworld Remastered Collection isn’t perfect. This is a stunningly beautiful game and a triumph of artistry over raw technical grunt. It’s a fine game but one that improves only incrementally on its predecessor.īoth games take place against a spectacular interstellar backdrop and it’s in the raw majesty of the starscapes, planet rises and dust clouds that Gearbox’s remaster shows its true quality. Some of the original game’s tactical choices have been scaled back, although the game features a wider range of capital ships and battles that are generally grander in scope. Core gameplay is broadly similar to Homeworld, albeit with some rebalancing and new mechanics thrown into the mix. Homeworld 2 picks up the story when a new threat to the Kushan emerge after the completion of their mission. Choosing the right combination of ships and deploying them in the right tactical formations is deep and rewarding and encourages experimentation both in building and battle. There’s a certain rock-paper-scissors dynamic to this aspect of the game bombers are vulnerable to fighters, which are easy prey for flak frigates, which are in turn impotent in the face of larger capital ships.

The game’s starship classes, running from the highly mobile but lowly fighters to the lumberous, gigantic but powerful capital ships, give space battles an epic scale and choosing the right fleet composition quickly becomes the key to success. Your fleet, centred around the colossal mothership, is vulnerable to attacks from above or below the primary plane while tactical exploitation of the same z-axis can allow your ships to drop in on the enemy unexpected. The core RTS mechanics of base-building, resource gathering, research and combat take on a new level of depth and complexity with the introduction of the third dimension. Barber’s Agnus Dei, a choral arrangement of Adagio for Strings, dominates the game’s soundtrack and lends gravitas and poignancy to the struggles of the Kushan in a genocidal conflict with their arch-rivals the Taiidan Empire.Įven a decade and a half on, it’s striking just how fresh and revolutionary Homeworld’s gameplay systems feel. Inspired by the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the game shares much with the 2004 reboot not only in terms of overarching plot but in visual aesthetic, sound design and music.

Homeworld is space opera writ large, the story of the Kushan people’s journey across the stars to find a mythical place of origin.

HOMEWORLD REMASTERED COLLECTION GAMEPLAY PC

Now, to drum up anticipation for their promised reprisal, Homeworld: Shipbreakers, Gearbox have packaged up remastered versions of the first two Homeworld titles and a standalone multiplayer mode, releasing the lot to eager PC gamers.

HOMEWORLD REMASTERED COLLECTION GAMEPLAY SOFTWARE

The franchise lay dormant for a decade before it was purchased by developer Gearbox Software at auction after the demise of publisher THQ. The last of the series, Homeworld 2, was released in 2003 and the strategy gaming community has clamoured for another sequel ever since. Back in 1999, when top-down titles like Starcraft, Total Annihilation and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun dominated the strategy niche, Relic Entertainment’s Homeworld was bravely pushing the genre where no game had gone before: into true, fully navigable three-dimensional space on a scale where missions spanned whole star systems and campaigns an entire galaxy. The phrase ‘ahead of its time’ is one that’s thrown around far too often in gaming and technology circles but if ever there was a game that turned its back on genre convention and rewrote the rulebook, it was PC real-time strategy classic Homeworld.

Homeworld remastered collection gameplay