Homeworld Remastered Collection Review

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Remasters like these are the best. They keep original game intact. Make the old game objectively better without introducing questionable changes. It allows players to play their game on modern systems and re-experience it again on higher resolution. However, this remaster in particular is quite underwhelming from technical standpoint and it highlights that not all old games were as good as we remember them to be.

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Quality of a remaster is disappointing. While developers did a great job in creating large ticket features like remaking game engine, remaking cutscenes and for that they need to be applauded, they still failed to deliver on smaller features. For one, it does not feature multi-monitor support. It is a pain to set game to run where you want it and even then, mouse will move to the next screen. On top of that, it does not support multi-channel sound. Game sends sound to my motherboard instead to my sound card which is default sound device. Then there are issues like Geforce Experience an OBS being unable to catch its API. I thought that the whole point of remaking game is to make it be modern and applicable to most modern software. I disliked game’s technical aspects, not to mention that community reports plenty of bugs and you need to download community patches.

Combat is quite terrible. It is just one giant insect fight, every ship goes into one massive blob and flies around. There is no tactical element outside of rock/paper/scissors. Furthermore, a lot of your ships are just straight out better variations of a same ship which results that you have to build specific units and others are quite frankly useless.

The most interesting and underwhelming mechanic are salvage corvettes. They can easily steal enemy ships. Even though they are quite fragile, they can capture enemy ships and convert them into their own. If sent individually, they are easy to destroy. The issue arises when you have to win your battles through sending swarms of them in order to capture the whole enemy fleet and convert them into your own doomstack. It is just all about that. The entire fighting system revolves around stealing ships while your fleet distracts them. It feels very gamey. While on the other hand, you must mine out the entire map as resources carry over. This results in 20 minute mission lasting over an hour where you do nothing, but mine entire map out…

Gameplay of a Homeworld 1 is disappointing. It is an old school try till you make it approach. Each mission is completely overtuned and unforgivable.
Each of them has a gimmick or something about them which you need to figure out. A strong attack might be coming. You might need to build specific counters for that attack. Then in others you have something like a derelict ship commanding other ships and taking control of your entire fleet. If you send your bombers at it, they are destroyed by capital ships easily. You need to figure out that you need to lure out other ships at the edge of its range, destroy them and then cheese it with bombers, attacking for a really long time before something happens. Either you can either lose your entire fleet or waste a lot of resources.

Each mission is like this. You need to figure out its twist and then it is dead easy while others are just dead easy. From mission to mission you accumulate resources until the last mission throws you an immense challenge. It just spawns billion ships next to your Homeworld and focus fires it. You cant even intercept them in time as you are not given enough time even to move your ships into position. The only way how you can counter that is by pre-spending all of your resources in previous mission by building a massive fleet to specifically counter what is coming in the next mission. The entire bank which you spent hours gathering after missions and accumulating need to be spent at that specific moment to build up fleet which you are going to encounter in a next mission. It is so damn cheesy and cheap. If Homeworld could get a medal for old school game BS design, it should get it.

I played the first campaign. People have good memories of it, because it starts off strong. However, it rapidly falls apart and starts to wander, doing nothing much. Gameplay is very unforgiving if you do not know what awaits you. Controls are here to fight you. There are tons of issues with the first game and people had to enjoy what they got.

 

        Story

• The problem with a story is that it tricks players that it is actually good. It has a strong start. It is impactful, easy to understand, delivered amazingly. However, from that point it wanders aimlessly. It logically leads into vengeance, but from that point we just wander across the galaxy. Somehow during that time we become the Chosen One. Then for some reason we have a perfectly good home planet to which we are travelling. Now we are target of an entire Empire for some reason. At the end Dark Vader uses Dark Force on our Karen to kill her. I’m not taking anything out of context. This is what happens. This is the exact amount of context you are going to have when playing through the campaign.
  
  Research
• The problem with research in this game is that each research is only shown once during a mission. Also, it is only sometimes shown. Some research has a possibility never showing up. It appears to be random and you can get different results restarting a mission. This is problematic, because some more complex ships require multiple technologies and you can easily lock yourself out of more exciting tech. In my playthrough, I locked myself out of missile destroyers. Research is such a fundamental feature in a game and Homeworld managed to mess even this up.

I do not write these reviews to crap all over old games, because they are old. I understand that old games have natural shortcomings such as graphics or scale. However, I had seen plenty of old games which are actually fun to play and compares well to modern day games. You do not even need a lot of resources to create a fun game. A lot of indie devs do just that right now. Thus, it does not matter if a game is old. Some of my classic games which I could play right now and are tons of fun. They are very old and are coming from my childhood.

What I dislike is when people uncritically review them, boasting how good they are. They are not. You are blinded by your own nostalgia and stupidity. Game which you just played do not compare to what you could had played otherwise. Given two options, you would never choose the old game, you will always pick newer if both of them are unfamiliar to you. Old games can be judged by many metrics. One of it is how fun it is actually to play. Other is how well story is being told. It doesn’t matter how old game is, anyone can make a fun story or fair gameplay. This is why it is important to remain objective and not give a bad game a pass just because you happened to play when there wasn’t any other games and all what was available was very low quality. Stop lying to people that your childhood games are good. They are not. You are just blinded by your own bias and nostalgia.

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