Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

An enjoyable, if fairly mediocre RTS. The theming, soundtrack, and art design do most of then heavy lifting, whilst the important parts of the technology, mission design, and story aspects of the game were apparently left on the cutting room floor. This product clearly had a lot cut out of it in order to get it to ship on time.


The game starts quite strong and presents some novel ideas (Homeworld, but in the desert!), but quickly descends into fighting identical missions in identical terrain using identical units. The most fun to be had is in using the carrier as an actual carrier, and launching wave after wave of jets against your enemy, with your ground fleet being the support that grabs the all important objectives.

I love the vehicle design, and I really like the cinematic style and VOX. But the actual story presented to us via these animations and cinematics is a garbled mess that 2/3rd of the way through jackknives itself. Everyone involved in the story and mission design just seems to give up, presenting us with some absurd plotting, and just dumping every technology upgrade in the game on you that they couldn't find a way to give you elsewhere. The final mission is completely anti-climatic, especially compared the previous few.

The combat is ok. The unit AI could be smarter, as units seem to shoot at the closest thing, rather than the thing they counter, and microing everything is tedious because all the enemies unit look like floating tanks, and if you zoom out far enough to see the NATOesque unit icons then they all blur into one, meaning you can't select the damn things. Thankfully the game features tactical pause (order whilst paused) meaning you can actually target that mission ship in the middle of the medium tanks. The combat mechanics are meant to take advantage of heights, but you can only really figure out the height of various dunes by using 3d mode and zooming right in, as it's completely absent from the tactical view. Another crucial feature also mission from tactical view: range. How am I meant to make informed decisions about the Carrier's range power settings, or where to station the artillery, if I don't even know how far 1300m actually is? Even homeworld 1 showed the range!

The mission design is fairly samey, uninspired, and predictable: baddies arrive in waves, shoot them! And then 2/3rd of the way through the mission, "surprising" enemy reinforcements appear in a cutscene. Oh no, it's another mixed group of units with two support cruisers, or perhaps even a carrier depending on how far along the game you are! Medium difficulty is ok, nothing too rushed, perhaps a bit on the easy side. "Classic" difficult is _very_ difficult, even the first few missions are hard in this mode!

Tech wise: You can't even change your hot keys, which is annoying. I also had consistent problems with sound stuttering and skipping if I played for a long time, required me to restart the game.

Over all, it's another RTS game that looks and sounds cool, gets old quite quickly, and is perhaps only worth it on 25% off.

A fun, cute, if some what niche and short rts. Made for a memorable experience. If you are a fan of home world, then chances are you'll enjoy this. With only 24 players online as of writing this, I would not call it ''multiplayer'' but I would call it ''fun''.

The campaign got me invested in the story; the emotional weight of it is gripping. Gameplay forces you to think carefully. In other RTS games I would usually just crank out enough units to overwhelm the enemy without care for the losses. This is the first one that really forced me to think about what I'm doing and care about protecting my units.

It's fun, very reminiscent of the good ol' Command & Conquer series or any other title in the RTS genre. The negatives:
- Short campaign and it was hard to get emotionally invested in the thin plot and then it's suddenly over. It's ok, It's like playing a campaign in FPS games, it's there but not the reason you bought the game.
- Unfortunately, the Skirmish mode is weak, very few maps to pick from and if you're a fan of the genre then you know how important this part is - There's just one (1) 6 player map, for example.
- As you improve you'd like to go 1 vs 2, 1 vs 3, 1 vs 4 and so on but it's not possible here as you'll get a "team unbalanced" message stopping you from going further. Great.
- You can't change shortcut keys (!) so if you're on a 60% keyboard you might miss out on important functions.
- The game will launch offline but you can't play offline, not even skirmish mode because everything is cloud-based. Had I known beforehand I probably wouldn't have bought it.
- Insane amount of bugs. Matches will crash 20 minutes in, enemies will freeze mid-air and just stay there. Most annoying of all is the resources bug, salvagers refusing to collect resources because it says it's already 2/2 salvagers there but in reality it's not so you have to wait until the bug clears itself and try again - hopefully you will not die whilst trying to get this sorted.
Not worth the full price since it's abandonware and will not see any updates or bugfixes (most likely) but at €5 I really can't complain, the price of a Happy Meal.

Surprise hit prequel to the Homeworld series. Still holds up as a multiplayer game. Better than Starcraft, haha.

I only recommend if you are a RTS fun & play all the over big tittles 6/10
Recently bought the homeworld games and started with this prequel. (never played homeworld before)
Well first of all bravo to the devs with what they did to unity many levels hide the ugly engine with particle effects, and the particle effects in this game are top notch. Cutscenes combine engine scenes with moving paintings and painted 3d models. Very smoothly fiting togheter. And leaving a beautifull impression behind.
Now the pro's and con's
PRO
- Original and engaging story
- 3h hindu inspired OST that is amazing
- I can keep my fleet over the missions
- Or choose the default fleet if you mess up last mission
- Saving during missions + checkpoints
- Overall visually great RTS if you don't look to hard for unity flaws
- I love the overview map that lets me zoom out a lot and macro manage
NEG
- Very short campaign, I did 30h but played most missions 3 times for max efficiency
- Ending felt a little empty but you have 2 remastred games to continue with
- Multiplayer, haha ooh and so many achievements for it, no its DEAD
- No pause or screenshot mode
- A very large portion of cutscenes are in the trailers, avoid to keep it fresh ingame
- I had one 'bug' in mission 4 by killing a unit that should not be there but overall no other bugs
KEYBOARD SPECIAL
- This is really stupid and will put off untech savy people but you can not rebind the controls, There is a VERY EASY way to use autokey so you can use ESC and WASD for menu and movement respectively (F10 and ◄↕► on default). Still how on earth did they not start with this feature from dev day 1 it is really easy to do. Harder to shoe horn in later.
CONCLUSION
The campaign is very scripted and if you replay the missions you might exploit that a little. But that is on you. I bought the game for the story first. RTS second, not very good at them and I finished on highest difficulty no problem. AI is much harder in skirmish and mp modes. Overall I had a great time.

I really enjoyed this alot i did not think to have a land base game of this game but the fact they did it makes it alot better it makes a change once in a while going from space to ground i like they added the crashed ships and the land airfield lol
i really loved thje design of the land vehicles specially the main characters car we....the big ass car
the story was good
the details were good
i did not like that you could not zoom all the way in but i did not find the need most of the time like i did in space
overhaul
i don't like that the game is now £2.99 i wish i waited till this game 22/12/2024 but that is out of my hand
10/10