The wait is over! Homeworld 3 is finally here.
New story, new soundtrack, new radio chatter, new generation at the helm. A lot of things changed, but the core is still the same: a fantastic journey through space.
Full disclaimer before we start. Gearbox has sponsored the YouTube video and hats provided me access to the game earlier to be able to showcase everything about Homeworld 3.
You can find a link HERE to learn more about it. Though the video is sponsored, the this post here is not. The only thing I am guilty of is that I love space games and therefore highlight different things than a regular reviewer. Sorry, not sorry.
We’re going over backstory, gameplay, graphics, sound design and give you a teaser of what else to expect.
HOMEWORLD 3 BACKSTORY
The developers from Blackbird Interactive stepped away from telling you stories in animated slideshows and went full in on cinematic storytelling. Homeworld always felt like you got to experience a story about a civilisation that was connected with some special characters. This time, Homeworld 3 will have a designated main character, Imogen S’Jet.
Her counterpart Intel officer Isaak Paktu, just referred to as Intel, is your connection to the Hiigaran Command and represents the military needs and is acting as the voice of Hiigaran interests.
Imogen is the third S’Jet we know in control over a mothership. It’s name is Khar Kushan which means The First Kushan and it’s a tribute to the first found derelict mothership, the Khar Toba which meant The First City. The Hiigaran also managed a crucial development step to build the Khar Kushan. The fabrication of synthetic hyperspace cores designed by Imogen S’Jet. This was necessary since the last mothership, the Kahr Sajuuk, disappeared in a region of space which is called the anomaly. Navigator of that lost ship is someone Homeworld players will remember, Karen S’Jet. The Khar Sajuuk is built in the same design, but incorporated the original hyperspace cores and its loss left the Hiigaran unable to use hyperspace at their own pace.
Maybe some of you already asked yourself how the connection between a ship and a human would actually work or feel like. Fortunately Imogen is going to explore this endeavor understandable for us by showing what’s going on in her head once connected to the device. She will be connected to the ship with her body and mind. But not only to the ship, but also directly to the hyperspace cores. And you will soon ask yourself if you found something greater than all humanoid life. This will lead to a rollercoaster of emotions and mysteries, which are told in beautiful cinematics and spoken by really good voice actors.
Switching from cinematics to actual gameplay got me by surprise. The visuals look amazing as you can see, but before that I want to tell you about the different ways to play Homeworld 3.
GAMEPLAY
Homeworld 3 is one of the few games that have something like an onboarding process. This decision is due to the many fans of the franchise that are used or at least know the controls of the previous games. Now you can choose between control presets. Modern will feel like you're using your camera like in a FPS game and Legacy will bring back the original Homeworld control scheme. There’s by the way an option to customize your experience if you’d like to mix things up. Let me tell you something about the modern scheme first.
In a way, it’s like a first person camera. You use your WASD keys to move forward, backwards and to strafe left and right. When you hold down your right mouse button, you can look around. But since we’re in a three dimensional space, you would like to go up and down too. And here’s an odd choice made by the devs. Q and E are your elevation keys, but if you're looking down on your units and you would like to manage them from a top-down perspective or have an easier way to select them, you can’t move forward anymore. When looking down, your forward becomes the elevation and the elevation is still the elevation. That has led to some awkward moments. There’s only one fix for that and it’s enabling the “Homeworld-style orbit camera rotation option”. I would have wished that Q and E would be up and down no matter where I look at or in which mode I am.
Personally, I can only recommend changing at least this one single option in your custom parameters. It does make managing spaceships in open space a lot easier.
All other changes make sense in my opinion. Especially cool is the ability to move units directly on terrain. Since Homeworld 3 introduces heavily cluttered areas with possible means to hide some of your ships, it’s nice that you can use the terrain, or rather any surface, to move your units adjacent to it. But be aware, objects in space especially with high velocity, are dangerous.
In some cases, when you want to gather your troops somewhere else in open space, you will still see the legendary movement disc but you will need to enable it by clicking into open space. It can happen that you accidentally send your units to a far spot on a surface, but once you get used to it, it won’t happen that often anymore. Emphasis on not that often.
Another feature from Homeworld is its sensors manager. In this view, blue spheres indicate sensor range, a.k.a. your vision. Objects can block this vision and you need to make good use of drones to not get ambushed or run into an unknown squadron. Different ships have different ranges, so be aware of your surroundings.
What you should know and the really well made tutorial is teaching you, is that there’s a pause button. So whenever things get crazy, get an overview be fore you jump back into the action. But here we encounter an additional oddity of Homeworld 3. Orders that you assign during pausing the game are not being shown to you immediately. They are kind of queued, but wait to be displayed once you continue the game.
That was a lot about controlling the game, but how does it play? Like in any good strategy game, you are dependent on a working and balanced rock-paper-scissor arrangement of troops. To understand your and your enemies strengths and weaknesses you have access to a basic but informative compendium. Whenever you encounter a new unit, a new artifact or challenges, you can look up all information and stats there. And here you will also see which ship type will work best to defeat your enemy or which ships you should keep away from them. Take for example the Assault Frigate. It’s strong versus fighters and low hull integrity targets, but suffers against long-range, single target, damage based ships like a Plasma Corvette. It doesn’t always need to be a bigger ship that you are struggling with, but of course numbers play a crucial role too.
Additionally, every ship type does have a special ability that can be activated and has a timed cooldown. This led to some discussions during the Wargames playtest, since there was no downside in spamming those abilities. The devs listened and added disadvantages to those abilities. For example, if you want your fighters to hit harder, they will likely suffer more losses, since their armor will be reduced during that time. Read the descriptions and use your abilities when necessary.
And don’t forget the mothership, it is capable of fighting too. Oh and important for us Homeworld veterans: the mothership can change its orientation to its legendary vertical orientation.
I played the campaign in medium difficulty and it was a fair challenge, which is increasing in difficulty over time, hence you will face more and diverse fleets. Good that you can pause and take a breather in between. You will also start with a fraction of the available ship types and get new types unlocked the moment you will need them to counter a specific attack. That’s when you should build them ASAP. Later you will have to manage your maximum of units and your available resources. Some maps can be thrifty with resource units.
Once you are done with the campaign, Homeworld 3 offers two other game modes for you to keep playing. Although, you don’t even need to start the campaign, since all game modes are unlocked right from the get go. One is the classic multiplayer with two or more players fighting each other or the skirmishes against NPC opponents.
The other mode is Wargames. That’s an attempt to combine rogue-lite gameplay with Homeworld strategy. I already did a video about it, which you can find HERE. To summarize it quickly: You start with a selected set of ships and fight your way through different encounters, unlocking new abilities and traits along the way. Once you’re defeated, you start again.
GRAPHICS
While managing everything that happens around you, you should take a breath and inhale the beautifully crafted environments you’re passing along your journey. Like I said before, Homeworld 3 surprised me elegantly with the transition from cinematic to gameplay. It took me a while to realize that we’re playing now. Even if you’re playing on the lowest graphic settings, the game still looks good. Blackbird Interactive shared the system requirements a few weeks before launch and they are stating that you can run it on low 1080p with a Geforce GTX 1060 or an AMD RX 480. The scale goes up to 4K with ultra Ray Tracing demanding an AMD 7900 XTX or a Geforce 4070Ti. Although in the final review version of Homeworld 3 there were only raytraced shadows and they didn’t make a huge difference. You can find a link to my hardware in the description, it’s pretty good and running the game on 1440p ultra there was no lag or frame drop, even in bigger messy fights.
If you're asking me what I like the most about Homeworld 3’s graphics, then I have to say it’s the engine glow and the projectiles. It just looks so cool to see those ships flying around and throwing those projectiles around the map. Oh and the derelicts. The surroundings are crazy atmospheric.
Up close, some ships look really nice while others are missing a little love. The Khar Kushan is definitely a great piece of equipment, with its turrets on rails. Some others like the attack frigates are not so nice, but are still following the design rules of former Homeworld games so I’m not mad about it.
SOUND DESIGN
There’s something about Homeworld as a series that makes it great. And it’s not just the music, it’s the entire implementation of the music and the sounds. The game never screams at you, it starts slow, it has a build up and it is loud when it needs to be.
The campaign is sometimes completely quiet except for your ships flying around or the ever occurring radio chatter between Fleet Command and Intel or from your squadrons reporting in. When there’s music playing it’s this non aggressive oriental soundtrack giving you a feeling of being on a journey. Sometimes you will hear drums when it’s a dangerous situation. All of this is only broken by the tension of a fight, when the music switches to empower the hostility.
Engine sounds are not the best and gun sounds are kind of generic. At least they are not over the top, but instead rather muffled, just like explosions. Sometimes I would have loved to feel more impact, even though I don’t know how to achieve it. Maybe with short high spikes at the explosion moment instead of a long ongoing series of explosions. But to be able to hear them at all, you need to get close to the action, since sounds are fading out the more you move away from your ships with the camera.
The cinematics on the other hand are top notch, making use of all the possibilities of mixing and controlling the sound space. Using spatial audio and effects to create a mysterious and engaging environment. One thing has changed though. Blackbird Interactive is not using classic music anymore, but rather an oriental synthwave style that’s okay, but it misses the heavy impact from Homeworld 1.
END
I have not even talked about modding yet, but since the game just launched it’s something we will need to wait for a bit longer. So there’s really just one thing for you to do. Check out Homeworld 3 and the entire franchise at the link in the description and enjoy this beautiful series on your own. We’ll read us in the next review, cheers and good night.
Check out the Homeworld Universe: https://bit.ly/CaptainCollinsHomeworld3
(this is the link from the sponsored video)
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