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For those unfamiliar with it, Homeworld is a 3D space realtime strategy game created by Relic Entertainment, and sold by Sierra. With extensive input on the storyline from Yes, who wrote a song for the game's closing credits (the game and song evolved together, and the song appears as the title track on the Yes CD The Ladder), it was released in 1999. Its breathtakingly immersive visuals, groundbreaking 3D game play, ethereal soundtrack by Paul Ruskay, and rich storyline immediately won it the Game of the Year award. Not too long after, Sierra and Barking Dog Studios brought out a follow-on, Homeworld Cataclysm, set just after the Taiidan/Hiigaran war and featuring the same basic game engine with minor control enhancements, new technologies, new ships and a new and mysterious alien threat. Still, Homeworld fans have spent the last three years or so eagerly awaiting the "true" successor from Relic, Homeworld 2.
Well, Homeworld 2 is here. And a worthy successor, it ain't. Sorry, Relic.
Sure, the more finely detailed and rendered ship models we were promised are there. But the "new, improved" storyline is unimaginative, the "new, improved" interface is cluttered and buggy, the illusion of immersion in 3D space is gone, Homeworld's fine-grained controls have been dumbed-down, the ending is just sort of blah, and the game substitutes massively overwhelming enemy forces and deus-ex-machina Progenitor superships for any kind of subtlety of plot or scenario. And don't even get me started on the historical revisionism.
In Homeworld, you could build any type of ships individually, and once built, you could choose from eight different formations to put any given group of ships in -- and they stayed in formation. (In fact, it was sometimes difficult to get them to break formation when you wanted them to.) In Homeworld 2, frigates and larger can still be built individually, but corvette-class ships get built in threes, PERIOD, and fighters get built in fives, PERIOD. Ship formations? What formations? You have no control whatsoever over ship formations any more. You get disorganized swarms, which you can combine only by forming them into "strike groups", and the only control you have over how the strike group is formed up is you get to pick from fighters in front, frigates in front, or capital ships in front. Even when in a strike group, your ships constantly mill around, drift out of position, break formation altogether, and generally do their own thing. This is an improvement?
That's not the only regard in which gameplay suffers. This game blatantly cheats. The new opponents are the Vaygr, a nomadic tribe of more-or-less primitive outer-rim raiders who are, nevertheless, somehow always one step ahead of you strategically and technologically. Somehow they've jumped instantly from being an unnoticed backwater nuisance to the scourge of the galaxy. They have infiltrator frigates that can board your ships and capture them, then the now-Vaygr-controlled ships turn around and fight against you. "Aha!" you think. "But the Hiigaran marine frigate can do the same thing!" And indeed it can. Except that it can't, because the game won't let it. Sure, your marines can board a Vaygr ship, they can move through it suppressing resistance, and they can take the bridge, but somehow when they get done capturing the ship, it's still a Vaygr ship, still under Vaygr control, and still trying to kill you.
In Homeworld, you could always use the time at the end of a mission to harvest resources, rebuild lost ships, and prepare your forces for the next mission. Not in Homeworld 2. The game does at least auto-harvest resources for you at mission end (and the wreckage of destroyed ships is now gatherable as resources), but forget about building your fleet back up for the next mission. The moment you complete the last mission objective (and of course, you don't always know what completes the last mission objective until you've just done it), BAM, you're out of there and off to the next mission. Hope you were ready. You weren't ready yet? Bummer, dude. Sucks to be you.
The Vaygr always know where in the galaxy you're going and why you're going there, and they almost always get there before you do and in superior force. Superior force is used in Homeworld 2 to fill in almost every gap that in the original Homeworld would have been filled by a clever scenario. Don't know what to do to make this mission more challenging? Well, heck, let's just throw in another dozen Vaygr battlecruisers. More battlecruisers are always good, right? (There are two classes of capital warship -- the destroyer and the vastly more powerful battlecruiser. The game limits you to five destroyers and two battlecruisers. In Mission 12, you will find yourself facing, in all, over 20 destroyers and as many as 15 battlecruisers. In Mission 13, if you have a strong secondary fleet of frigates -- battlecruisers casually wipe their feet on frigates in passing, by the way -- you will be attacked almost upon starting the mission by eight battlecruisers AT ONCE, with a full complement of supporting ships and a literal cloud of fighters.) This gets old fast.
Plot-wise, it scarcely matters if you achieve your mission objectives or not, the Vaygr have always already got whatever you came for. This extends to the ancient Progenitor dreadnought you capture in mission 10, and the Progenitor "keepers" guarding it. These little tiny "keeper" ships are so powerful the game informs you that you can't defeat them, and then the Bentusi show up with a super-mothership (the last remaining Bentusi mothership, you are told) and declare that the only way to defeat the Keepers is for them to scuttle their mothership, which they then proceed to do. But, wait -- Makaan, leader of the Vaygr, turns out to have one of these too. What gives? How did he overcome the Keepers? Did the Bentusi, who agree with you that the Vaygr are the enemy, happen to have another last mothership that they scuttled on behalf of the Vaygr? No, it's just one of several deus ex machina gambits. You eventually end up chasing the Vaygr through a deus-ex-machina Progenitor hyperspace gate to the galactic core, where you battle Makaan for possession of Sajuuk, a deus-ex-machina Progenitor SUPER-dreadnought, with which you must return to Hiigara just in time to save it from being bombed back to the pre-Cambrian by Vaygr deus-ex-machina planetkillers which, gee, are immune to all conventional weapons. Where do the Vaygr keep getting all these wonderful toys? "Why didn't somebody tell me he had one of those?" Are you the only power in the galaxy that DOESN'T have this "forbidden atmosphere-deprivation weapon"? Isn't it lucky that by this time you have a Progenitor deus-ex-machina superdreadnought that's the only weapon that can destroy them? (But don't get too close to them when you engage them. If you get your deus-ex-machina superdreadnought too close, it won't use its main armament -- and even then, you've got to constantly micromanage it and manually retarget it on each of the three planetkillers after every shot, or it'll lose interest and wander off to go do something else.)
I said something in the beginning about historical revisionism, didn't I? Let's recap a moment to Homeworld. As you learn in Homeworld, your Hiigaran people once created a galaxy-spanning empire and established the outer rim trade routes, before being brought low by a vicious civil war, from which the survivors of your race were driven in ignominious exile by the Taiidan and forbidden to ever again develop hyperspace travel. After centuries trekking across the galaxy in generation ships seeking a new home, with groups splitting off along the way, you eventually made planetfall on the desert world of Kharak. There, you forgot your spacefaring ancestry for four thousand years, until you developed orbital spaceflight again and a satellite detected the ancient wreckage of one of the generation ships buried beneath the sands of the Great Desert that spans most of Kharak. From this wreckage, you reverse-engineer hyperdrive technology and, in a project lasting a hundred years, you build a hyperspace core and a great Mothership in which you will set off across the galaxy, with six hundred thousand colonists in suspended animation, on a quest to find your ancient homeworld. As you learn, one such hyperspace core is required for every mothership-class vessel (in fact, this is a key factor in reconstructing parts of your lost history, as it is by recognizing that your hyperdrive technology is identical to theirs that you realize your kinship with the dwellers in the Kadesh Nebula). You have a hyperspace core, the Kadeshi have hyperspace cores, the Taiidan have hyperspace cores, the Turanic Raiders have hyperspace cores, the Bentusi have hyperspace cores, everyone has hyperspace cores. In the closing moments of the final mission of Homeworld, after you destroy the Taiidan Emperor's mothership, the Bentusi bring the Galactic Council to hear your case, and about 20 Council megaships (each, presumably, with a core) hyperjump in. I mean, we're talking an off-the-shelf commodity item here.
But wait! In Homeworld 2, set two hundred years or so later, there were only ever three hyperspace cores in the galaxy, and they were all created by the Progenitors, who gave one to you, the Hiigarans, one to the Bentusi, and apparently misplaced the third somewhere on the outer rim. Apparently no-one else can ever build another hyperspace core, or ever has, and all three cores have to be re-united to activate the Progenitor superdreadnought Sajuuk, which will make whoever does it ruler of the galaxy. (By the way, that hyperspace core you built in Homeworld 1 by reverse-engineering the wreckage you found has mysteriously retroactively become one of these three million-year-old artifacts. Does your brain hurt yet? Don't worry, it will.) In the Homeworld 2 universe, nobody pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps and got where they were by their own merits -- the Progenitors picked three names out of a hat and handed out cookies to the lucky winners, only one of the three put his cookie down somewhere and forgot it. Oh yeah, and about those outer rim trade routes you established? That map, or one looking just about like it, gets re-used as a throwaway right before the closing credits for a map of a hitherto-unsuspected network of Progenitor hyperspace gates spanning the Galaxy. They've been there for a million years or so with no-one ever knowing they were there, except for the Balcora Gate, which nobody knows about either, except for Hiigaran Captain Soban -- as far as I can tell, Soban steals the location of the Balcora Gate from the Vaygr, who get the location of the Balcora Gate from Captain Soban by capturing and interrogating him after he steals it from them . . . (NOW your brain hurts, right?) Will someone please explain to me how you establish outer rim trade routes that span a galaxy when nobody except for the Hiigarans and the Bentusi have hyperdrive, and even they only have one hyper-capable ship each?
How did this happen? The answer seems to be that Sierra got bought by Vivendi Universal Entertainment, which seems to be on a quest to borg every game manufacturer it can get its hands on. Vivendi owns Sierra, Vivendi owns Blizzard, Vivendi owns EA, Vivendi owns Knowledge Adventure, Vivendi owns Fox Entertainment ... they own telecom companies, they own TV production companies, they own record labels (Universal Music Group), you name it. And it seems Vivendi has one of those reverse golden touches -- everything it gets creative input into turns to pig manure. This is just speculation, but my guess is that like the saga of TNT and J. Michael Straczynski's Crusade, middle managers at Vivendi felt they had to "leave their mark" on Homeworld 2 by screwing with it. (When this happened with Crusade, JMS put up with it only so long, up to the point that TNT demanded gratuitous fistfights on the bridge and gratuitous T&A, at which point he basically told them he'd had enough of their meddling and they could shove it where the sun don't shine.) In a weird way, Homeworld 2 has a kinship with the theatrical release of Highlander 2 -- take the original "characters" and most of the basic story ideas, add a bunch of complete bullshit that makes no sense in the context of the original story, stir well, and decant for the mass market.
So here's a "Nice try, guys" for Relic Entertainment, a regretful two thumbs down for Homeworld 2, a resounding and odorous fart for Vivendi Universal Entertainment, and a heartfelt sigh for what could have been.
you are completely wrong
Re: you are completely wrong
In the Homeworld2 historical revisionism, yes. That's not what the Bentusi tell you in the original Homeworld. In Homeworld 1, after you save a Bentusi mothership from destruction at the hands of the Empire at the Tannhauser Gate, the Bentusi tell you that your ancestors built a great empire and established the Outer Rim trade routes.
You found the second core in the uncharted space before the exile. The three space cores ARE THE ONLY LONG JUMP CAPABLE ONES, there are plenty of short jump cores reverse engineered from Bentusi blue prints.
Excuse me, you're missing what I said. Did YOU actually read my review carefully? In Homeworld 1, YOU BUILT YOUR OWN HYPERSPACE CORE by reverse-engineering the wreckage of a crashed starship you found in the Great Desert on Kharak. In Homeworld 2, that hyperspace core has magically become one of the Three Original Cores. It's not only historical revisionism, this whole three-original-longjump-cores thing was basically introduced as a deus ex machina, and frankly it's a deus ex machina that wasn't even necessary. They could easily have come up with a different way to reactivate the superdreadnought Sajuuk.
The Progenitor mothership was destroyed and scattered across a whole sector, so it is no surprise that the Vaygar got their hands on some Progenitor weaponry.
Oh, sure it was. But no-one's found anything from it for a million years, and now suddenly everyone's finding Progenitor weaponry all at once?
Another point you missed: It took the self-destruction of what YOU in your own words agreed was the ONLY Bentusi mega-ship to destroy the Keepers guarding the Progenitor dreadnought YOU found. How did the Vaygr destroy the Keepers guarding theirs? What super-weapon did they have that's as devastating as a self-destructing Bentusi mega-ship, and if they have such a weapon, why aren't they using it against you? And if they only had ONE such super-weapon, gee, wow, what an amazing coincidence. Just like the amazing coincidence that the Vaygr have this Empire planetkiller weapon that just happens to be immune to all conventional weaponry, but they don't deploy it until you have the one weapon in the Galaxy that can defeat it.
The whole storyline of Homeworld 2 is full of these dei ex machina. Without them, it falls apart, but it didn't have to be that way. That's a major part of what pisses me off. Homeworld 1 had a strong, self-consistent story that could stand on its own without the need for dei ex machina. Homeworld Cataclysm arguably relied a little more on them -- granting the original premise of the Beast, one could argue that the siege cannon and the Naggarok were dei ex machina -- but it wasn't littered with them and didn't depend on them. There was a strong story outside of them. Homeworld 2, sadly, follows the tradition of way too many Hollywood sequels -- same players, lots of flashy new effects, weak plot, but never mind, the name will carry it in the theatres.