Homeworld 2

"Another give us our paycheck sequel"

The original Homeworld was a class act every step of the way. It rapidly became one of my favorite games of all time for it's excellent and involving storyline, top notch graphics and a soundtrack that I was actually thrilled to get a separate cd for in it's GOTY edition. Brilliant ship to ship space battles had me playing the original right up to #2's release. Sadly this game has fallen well short of that standard.

Let's start off with performance. I run Homeworld 2 on a P4 1.5, Radeon 9700, 512 MBRam, Audigy2 ZS. I have to play Homeworld 2 in it's lowest graphics setting,(800x600) with EVERYTHING turned off and it still staggers to a stuttering crawl as soon as a lot of ships start slugging it out. I have read review after review stating the same thing from folks whose systems power dwarf mine. Since the entire point of the game is for a lot of ships to be slugging it out near constantly, this is not good. Especially when I can make Max Payne 2 and Unreal 2 look really good and still run smoothly. The game crashes. Too much. Once I changed my res from 8x6 to 1024x768 requiring the game to restart to reinit the driver. It never worked again until I reinstalled it. Max and Unreal do none of this, but then I can patch those. Supposedly Sierra is hard at work on patch for the games morass of bugs and problems. No release date set, as we roll right on into 2004. Games been on the shelves for months. Bottom line is we are unpaid beta testers with this one.

Graphics are great. Much like the first game but better and in subtle ways at that. Mothership looks much like we remember but with better color and definition, probes sticking out and cleaner ports of entry. Alot more ship animations on small scale as well. The turrets and missile launchers are much more realistic looking as they fire, and I felt explosion looked very nice.

Sound is okay. While it's soundtrack did not live up to the first one, it is still enjoyable enough, sometimes even a little funky sounding with reggae sounding beats, it sounds like it would be out of place in a space sim, but I thought that oddly it worked out. Effects are good but not spectacular. I particularly enjoy the sounds of a carrier or shipyard exploding. If you zoom in you can hear bulkheads groaning and buckling. Not enough variety held this category back.

Gameplay is another area where they really copped out. It has an AI that monitors the fleet you have at the end of a mission and then allots the CPU ships accordingly in the next. In other words it deliberately cheats, granting the CPU the best mix of ships it needs to smash your fleet. There are less ships per side than in the original where it should have had more. You can no longer order your ships into the formations of old. In fact really there aren't any formations any more save which ship out of a group you would like in the front. A design decision that left me shaking my head in bafflement. Who could have possibly thought THAT was an improvement? I liked that rather than having single fighters you now have squadrons of five per group, that at least was an improvement in management. However since all ships attack first the type they are most effective against, you quickly realize that combat is no longer about fleet strategy but instead size. Frigate armor is so poor now that you lose them like you used to lose fighters. Enemies will virtually always redirect fire against any resourcers you might use to try an repair those frigates with extreme prejudice rendering the repair ability useless. You can build beam and gun platforms (basically one move stationary turrets) problem is they are useless as well as they are entirely too weak to accomplish anything other than irritate the enemy for a very short time.

Story as well they went to sleep for. At first it seems pretty good and epic in it's scope. Nothing is ever done with it's potential. Little if anything is really explained. Just pasted together formulaic video game trash is what the final storyline amounts to.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 12/19/03