Amongst the spate of remasters, remakes and rehashes of the last few years, Homeworld is more worthwhile than others. While the worst examples have been cynical attempts to cash-in with a casual re-skin or improved texture pack, the best have added genuine value to the original proposition. Happily, the Homeworld Remastered Collection falls into the latter camp, with new franchise custodian, Gearbox Software, even taking the opportunity to make small adjustments to improve the underlying game based on wisdom drawn from careful retrospection and a vocal fan base.
It’s a testament to the strengths of the 1999 original and its 2003 sequel that this space-based RTS is worth re-introducing into the 2015 PC game market at all. Homeworld was a revelation when it was originally released, offering epic space combat in a three-dimensional environment and while commanding dozens of units and simultaneously manipulating multiple axes has become second nature to today’s audience, Homeworld still has much that shines with which to dazzle.
Its narrative beats to an evocative score and its story is a space opera of the highest order that sees a beleaguered race left homeless aboard a giant mothership; its planet destroyed in retaliation for the unwitting contravention of a four-thousand-year-old covenant. What follows is part-revenge, part-relocation effort as you guide the Kushan against the ruthless Taiidan empire with the story unfolding via in-game chatter and stylised, hand-drawn cut-scenes that bookend each of the game’s sixteen missions. With another fifteen missions making up Homeworld 2, the two games are best viewed as two halves of one grand tale that make playing through both titles as engaging as a marathon weekend session spent watching Battlestar Galactica on Blu-ray.
Reinforcing Homeworld ’s storytelling is its persistent structure, which sees all units and resources from one level carried over to the next. As such, it’s possible to grow attached to groups of units that have performed particularly well, despite there being no explicit progression system or experience trees for them to gain meaningful veterancy. Instead, researching new technologies enables you to build new ships but it’s reassuring to know that the early scouts and interceptors still have a place in your fleet even after the hulking destroyers and heavy cruisers enter the fray.
In practice, it’s you that grows in power and experience as you develop new tactics and a greater understanding of the advantages of the grouping and formation systems. By mixing the nimble but poorly armoured fighter units with heavier frigates and cruisers, you create numbered groups that specialise against rival ships’ vulnerabilities or can run interception patterns when your mothership or resource gatherers come under fire. The action is most spectacular up close, although it’s often most practical to view it from afar in order to react to new threats, particularly when your handful of units swells to a fully fledged armada.
Straightforward but versatile ship abilities further enhance your ability to react to an unexpected turn of events. The lowly salvage corvette remains a favourite right to the end for while it lacks firepower, its ability to hustle lone enemy ships and drag them back to base for conversion and redeployment against their former masters is a trick that never gets old – and one that actually becomes essential later in the game. Despite the healthy variation in the five basic ship models and the fact that a number of the later levels prove incredibly challenging, the game does well to empower you with its systems, rather than leaving you feeling lost in space.
However, while most of the minor changes that Gearbox has elected to make ultimately enhance Homeworld – such as dropping the necessity to manage fuel as a resource and removing the requirement to mine resources at the end of each mission or lose them – a scant few appear less successful and so ships can be more frequently caught out of formation and pulverised than in the original Homeworld. As such, manual intervention is sometimes required to prevent errant units being pulverised by the larger prey that they are meant to be harrying.
Homeworld ’s campaign missions constitute a worthwhile saga in their own right and the original versions of Homeworld and its sequel are also included for those who want to turn back the years. Nonetheless, there is an additional option present in the game launcher should you wish to test your mettle against rival captains. Homeworld’s multiplayer is in beta, which carries with it the associated caveats about being a work in progress, but it deftly blends together the remastered versions and their associated factions for both co-op and versus play. The former also introduces a simple but welcome competitive element by tasking cooperative partners with researching, building or mining a certain number of techs, ships or resource units before their teammates.
There are some balancing issues stemming mainly from the fact that it incorporates all four factions from both Homeworld titles that were theoretically never meant to meet. However, Gearbox appears committed to improving this element of the game and if it shows the same care and attention that it’s shown elsewhere in the remastering then the multiplayer should grow to become a great deal more robust in the coming weeks and months.
This Remastered Collection represents a genuinely valuable and worthwhile reworking of beloved franchise that has been out of the spotlight for many years. It looks fantastic and boasts a story worth telling, but perhaps the most satisfying thing about this update is that it offers both long-term fans and new recruits the same thing: a solid, rewarding and relevant space RTS that belies its significant age.