Homeworld 2

"How good is not good enough?..."

When you think about how or whether you enjoyed a game it's usually in one of two ways: you either enjoy a game 'because of', or 'in spite of'. Homeworld and Cataclysm were 'because of', but Homeworld 2 comes into the 'in spite of' camp, at least for me.

Any genuine sequel to Homeworld was always going to have a lot to live up to, maybe too much. Had Cataclysm been a disaster the developers would have been able to say "Yeah, but it's not really counted as a sequel", which it wasn't. It was the next in the Homeworld series, yet didn't continue its predecessor's plotline; in the same way by which Final Fantasy 8 is FF7's sequel.

But Cataclysm wasn't a disaster, and it was in many ways even better than Homeworld, though others would disagree. It was a better and more purely fluid game than Homeworld.

The point of all of the above is that Homeworld 2 now had not one but two distinctly great games to beat if it was going to do the HW series proud. As a game in its own right Homeworld 2 was good, though not great. It was a fun game, and with most of the traditional Homeworld aspects it could hardly fail to be; but where it definitely did fail was in trying to better HW and Cataclysm in certain areas in which those games either couldn't be bettered or never needed bettering in the first place.

Homeworld 2 is similar enough to the other games in terms of basic gameplay, but gameplay does have a few factors to consider. It's not just watching your ships flying around and attacking other ships.

Interface, for example. When are game developers going to learn? Homeworld's interface wasn't perfect, but it did its job and didn't mess you about. Cataclysm's interface was nigh-on perfect, with a lot of very useful features which did nothing to impede the players. So why did HW2's programmers take this perfect interface and change it? IT WAS FINE, SO LEAVE IT ALONE! ARGH! The construction manager was the worst offender - rather than open the manager, double-click on the desired ship, close the manager, you were confronted with a confusing mess of icons, submenus, + and - keys... Pointless and off-putting. I won't go on any more about the interface, but there were far too many changes for the worse, which were put in to the obvious detriment of the game overall.

Another aspect of gameplay is that the element of fun was not improved upon in any way. No strategically interesting new ships, an absence of many ships which were useful and fun in Homeworld, the inclusion of stupid new ships which served no purpose at all except to allow you to abide by objective restrictions imposed on you by the mission designs (gun platforms? marine frigates? movers?), and other worthless things like subsystems which made it easier for your enemies to kill off important functions of your super-capital ships. There was in fact only one really memorably positive vessel in the entire game, and that was a ludicrously overpowered tank which you only used in one level.

And the enemies: who are these people, and why? In fact what is the plot? The galaxy is under attack, stop it, the end? Yeah, great. Gimme some decent ships and I might be interested. I've played this game multiple times and I still have no real idea what the hell's happening. Why am I in this particular system, using these movers to collect this thing from among dangerous radiation? Dunno, maybe the next mission will make it clear... nope, I'm wrong. Sigh.

Speaking of missions: none of them are truly memorable. There are no spooky ones, no weird ones, no enthralling ones, no really tricky ones. There are just... ones. You play a mission in the hope that the next one is going to be the show-stealer, but it never really comes. There are some interesting bits, like the first mission in which you encounter the movers, or the one where you're protecting the Bentusi, but too many of them just involve your ships either fending off attacks en masse or piling forward to engage enemy ships en masse. I'm not saying every HW and Cataclysm mission was amazing and that all of HW2's are pish, I'm just saying that a sequel with this much to prove should have even greater missions than those in the previous games. HW2 simply doesn't - they're not bad, but also just not good enough.

Homeworld, and more particularly Cataclysm, managed to draw you into the plot and the tension by variously using cutscenes, characters, voices, music and direction. Homeworld 2 doesn't manage this either, though it occasionally has half-arsed attempts at it. Not one single moment from Homeworld 2 sticks in my mind, and this is sad because it's another great aspect of the Homeworld series which is missing from this third instalment.

And all of this may explain why HW2 is enjoyable 'in spite of'. It offers nothing spectacularly new - there is just no reason to play this instead of HW or Cataclysm. It improves on them in no way, and yet it isn't a bad game in itself - in fact it really is fun. This is however more of a testament to the beauty of the Homeworld engine and concepts, rather than anything which Homeworld 2 invented or added. It's the game you play when you're bored of the 'real' Homeworld games. If Cataclysm had been painted as the real sequel to Homeworld and then the series ended there, the Homeworld legacy would have been preserved, but HW2 is a sad final note on which to end the series. It went out on a low - a high-ish low, but still a low, if you follow me. If not, play HW2 after playing the others and I guess you'll find out for yourself.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 08/07/07