Homeworld Remastered Collection

########## Home World 2 Review ########## The chronological best way to play the series is: Deserts of Kharak, HW 1, HW2. However I would not suggest playing HW1 at all. The campaign is so borked (see review below), just watch the story cinematics online. BUT HW2's campaign fixes nearly every gripe I had with HW1 (Mission 9 is the biggest exception). HW2's campaign is amazing and hads some QoL over HW1. For example: when you complete a mission it will automatically harvest all the resources on the map and instantly add them to your bank; most cinematics and even tactical map briefings can be skipped with ESC key and they actually pause the game while they're happening. The only 2 downsides I've seen is that sometimes the gameplay cinematics at mission start are not skippable, and that once your final objective is achieved the mission auto-ends. So, if you can you might want to build your fleet up, BUT that doesn't really matter either because mission difficulties are dynamic based on how big your fleet is. HW1 is a mess to play, but HW2 and DoK are masterpieces. ########## Home World 1 Review ########## This game is fun. It's a legendary title from the before times. But it has a TON of issues. -Very buggy, crashes a lot. -Some missions are extremely unfair and you will fail them almost instantly. Some due to unique events, and some due to poor balancing. The PlayerPatch (you can get from the Workshop) fixes a few of these but then makes other things way harder than they need to be. BUT then the game crashes at the end of every level. -The only way to beat some levels is to already know what coming. Which means your not playing and reacting dynamically to situations, you're just simulating precognizance. What ships to build and how many, how much money to save, where to move, etc. all are not things a new player will be able to deduce. Instead they will just play the level, get all their ships blown up by an invincible enemy or stolen by an anomaly, then not left with enough resources on the map to build a replacement fleet and lose. - Resources in campaign are far too scarce. So, if you make a mistake and lose a good chunk of your fleet then there's no recovering from that and you need to restart. You need to play every level basically making no mistakes. -Fleet and resources carry over from each level. This is a great mechanic but the problem comes from what I stated above plus it's not as if each level has the same amount of resources or increasing levels of resources. You could lose a big chunk of your fleet and resources in one level, then go to the next level and there's almost nothing to harvest. Meaning you've already lost because you did win perfectly in the previous level. - The story and basic gameplay concept is A tier, but the campaign levels themselves are not very fun, since you're not strategizing or reacting, you're just brute forcing trial & error save scumming/restarting until you win. - Campaign will often take control away from you for WAY longer than necessary to show a scripted scene. There are multiple times where the game will follow an enemy flying all the way to your carrier and you can't intercept them. - Camera controls are terrible. the 3 demensions of movement is cool but when you try to change elevation there is no reliable way to ensure you send them to the correct spot, unless there's a marker there. When you exit the tactical view there's no telling where your camera will go, and you can only zoom in/out so far with the mouse wheel and then you need to use the Ins/Del buttons to make the camera continue moving up/down (moving hands from a set position is a big no no imo). -If you rebind keys then many actions become bugged. For example: I tried to make my left hand control the camera instead of using unit actions. This led to my units always trying to do an attack move, even non-combat units (which meant they sometimes wouldn't move at all). Also, even though the game has multi-key inputs (i.e. Ctrl +A) you can't actually make multi-key binds yourself. -Some dated controls and lacking of QoL improvements that you can see in Deserts of Kharak (the prequel game). Like I said, LOTS of problems, but the game can be fun. It's just such a shame because there's so much that is cool about this game and there isn't anything else that's like it.