Matching players up against each other, it’s your standard conquer all affair, but Gearbox has combined the two titles’ multiplayer modes together, meaning you can match up armies never designed to fight. There are some issues in the multiplayer as well, which can be played offline against the computer. Early flaws in your plan can scupper you, meaning rebooting a save can be useless,and you’ll soon learn to overcompensate on resource collectors at the start as losing your income stream is as good as dying when more and more enemy units start to spawn. Often this leads to restarting a mission from scratch. Sometimes the campaign missions suffer with pacing, either with too long a build up or, worse, a sudden ramping up of difficulty, with opponents overwhelming you before you have any chance to react. Issues from the originals remain however. Add in the notes of panic in the voices of your pilots as they announce they are going down, and the calm, collected – almost disconcertingly so – tone of your Mothership and the atmosphere is creates is perfect. The sweeping chords of resource-collecting strike against the discordant notes of battle, tying in wonderfully with the sounds of engines and shots hitting their mark. The tone of the audio fits magnificently alongside all of this. Amongst all that you have the knotted engine trails of the smaller fighters, the explosions tearing chunks out of dying ships and the drifting wreckage of those already lost, all set against the beautiful backdrop of space. Ships are packed full of detail, with textured surfaces covered in blinking lights and crenulations, their weapon fire ranging from little sparks to brilliant white beams of light. The Homeworld games always looked great for their time, but thanks to Gearbox they now look downright gorgeous. Not that leaving you to watch is a bad thing. Instead, it allows you to focus on your larger ships and direct their fire where it will be most productive, perhaps the engines of the carrier trying to escape the battle, or the flak frigates causing havoc to your smaller craft. This could leave you feeling like there is little to do but watch, but in practise it’s a small blessing, as trying to pick out individual fighters to direct them to their next target can be tricky. Each will pick out a sensible target for their class, unless ordered to do so, so there is no need to micromanage – an aspect from Homeworld 2 that has been brought into the first game. Left to their own devices, your ships are reasonably clever, too. The UI is also relatively clean, with clear construction and research menus using unit icons to differentiate them. It’s a quick and simple way of assessing how a battle is going, and for moving units long distances. To aid you further, hitting the spacebar zooms you all the way out of the battle so you can view the entire map, with units represented by various icons depending on their class. It makes controlling units in a three-dimensional space a doddle, which is no small feat. Units are controlled with a right click, either on a target or in the middle of space, with the latter bringing out a disc on the horizontal plane, the radius of which indicates the distance between the ship and its new location, while holding the left button and dragging changes the height. Each play a distinct role, and while a balanced fleet is essential, it can be achieved with different combinations. – and researching the required hull if necessary. Capable of producing most units, doing so involves constructing the correct module – fighter, frigate etc. Your Mothership is the focal point of the fleet, and its destruction means instant failure. As with most RTSs, gameplay is a balance between collecting resources, building units and defeating your opponent. Meanwhile, the core gameplay hasn’t aged at all. Brilliantly written, both start you off on the back foot, chased when you thought you were safe, and see you gradually retake the initiative. Without giving away too much, the stories both follow a similar pattern: in one, a civilisation is forced to journey across the stars to find the home of their ancestors in the other, after many years the same people go to war. Such is the case with Homeworld 1 and 2, brought back to your screens after over a decade and, while Gearbox has undoubtedly done a great job on the visuals and audio of these classic RTSs, it’s the original gameplay itself that makes these two worth playing after so long. When remastering a game, it no doubt helps when said game is already excellent.
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