Homeworld 2

"The black-sheep of the Homeworld series."

HM2 has three major flaws that I perceive in gameplay.

1) It is pointless to conserve your fleet, you are not rewarded for it. There is an abundance of resources on close to every level, so that never becomes a serious concern. And the enemy fleet grows based on proportion to your own, making it further pointless. Unlike in the previous two games (especially HM1) salvaging is not an effective and fun means to increasing the size and strength of your fleet. If you have a Marine Frigate on the scene, that will be the first thing all enemy ships take aim at. Perhaps Marine Frigates should be renamed suicide ships or patsy runners.

2) The game is highly linear. At many points in the game the enemy fleet will attack you infinitum - wave after wave - not stopping until you finish a specific objective. Whereas in the previous games you could set your own strategy to beating a level, in HM3 that is predetermined for you by mission objectives. Also you get no leeway between missions, you jump from one to the next once all mission objectives have been completed. In HM1 and HMC after every mission (unless it became a priority to jump into hyperspace) you had the capability to collect resources (what is left of resources at the end of a mission in HM2 is automatically collected with a wave of the magic wand), build ships, set attack groups, research technology, and generally putter around as much as you wanted on cleared missions.

3) Micromanagement is unnecessary. Ships automatically attack ships they are strongest against, degenerating tactics to building a large enough, diverse enough fleet and then throwing it at the enemy. It's really dull.

HM2 has minor flaws as well.

The technology tree is as simplistic as ship management, amounting to leveling up armour and engines three times over. Furthermore the ships in this game aren't as advanced as ships in HM1 and HMC, taking a technological step backwards (no more cloak fighters, beam frigates or hive frigates for instance).

Corvettes and Fighters are built as squadrons not individual units anymore. So you can't assign individual units duties nor make personalized squadron formations. Furthermore, the Tactics and Formations for both Fighter/Corvette Class and Capital Class ships are severely limited in retrospect to the previous two games.

HM2 lacks the production value of the previous two. The music and voice acting is unmoving. In HM1 the 'Platoon' song at the beginning and the 'Yes' song during the credits both complemented the story the way music is supposed to. As were the mission scores, for instance when you are first introduced to the Turanic Raiders or the Bentusi. The voice acting throughout the game was emotionally moving and expressive. In HMC the game opens with a space battle at the Hiigaran Homeworld (where the previous game left off), and the story revolves around an epic space mystery/hunt. Albeit the voice acting in HMC was annoying for the units.

The HM2 storyline is horrible. I thought HMC went too far with the technological advances from one little Kiith but that is nothing compared to this piecemeal of a story that looks like it was thrown together last minute. The story creates no incentive to finish the game and progress forward, which adds to the problems with the production value.

Despite the developers attempts to create a 'rock/paper/scissors' approach vis a vis ships, HM2's basic gameplay is unbalanced and you'll soon realize that a few types of ship are critical to winning the game. HM1 accomplished gameplay balance best of the three, you needed to optimize every class of ship if you hoped to win; in HMC fighters/corvettes were less effective given the heat seeking capital ship turrets, Kiith Somtaaw's tech systems innovations, and the smaller ships susceptibility to the beast virus in mass. The Frigate Class ships clearly had an advantage over the Fighter/Corvettes, and the Super Capital Ship Class of destroyers and dreadnoughts had clear advantages over all ships, so HMC was mainly a capital ship game. HM2 does the reverse, fighters/corvettes clearly have an advantage over all other ships. Of those, namely Bombers and Pulsar Gunships cut through anything larger than them like butter, and need but an Interceptor escort to protect them from other fighters/corvettes.

Now for the good.

The graphics are excellent, yet it is not the jaw dropping exceptionalism of the first HM1. The voice acting for unit commands isn't annoying like it was in HMC.

HM2 shines as a multiplayer online game, and I think that's where development focused. Of course it's the single player game that has made the Homeworld series so grand; Vivendi Universal missed that and HM2 is the black-sheep of the series. The game was a disappointment to play, Vivendi traded on much of what made the series fun.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 09/13/04