Homeworld 2

Disclaimer: I played Homeworld 2's Remastered version, with the fanmade Players' Patch halving the dynamic difficulty scaling.

Homeworld 2's solo campaign is a disappointing sequel to one of the most beloved game stories of all time. The original Homeworld had a simple but potent emotional core of desperation, beautifully complemented by gameplay features. After seeing your home planet razed, you had no choice but to forge on towards the titular Homeworld. Your persistent fleet served as a living record of your journey: a single fighter that survived from the first mission to the end, a flagship captured from a faction defeated in the early missions, a doomstack of ion cannon frigates spirited away just because you could. By the end of the penultimate mission, you could appreciate how far you had come and how much had been sacrificed.

There's basically nothing to Homeworld 2's story. It's hard to overstate how vapid and nebulous the plot is. After an attack on Hiigara (the titular Homeworld), your fleet bounces from MacGuffin to MacGuffin, until you eventually kill the bad guy in the penultimate mission and get your hands on the biggest, baddest spaceship the galaxy has ever seen. You return to Hiigara to wipe out his doomsday weapon, and a vague galaxy-changing prophecy is realized. Vague mysticism and Bungie-style capital nouns (Sajuuk, the Balcora Gate, the Three Hyperspace Cores) don't make for an engaging story, no matter how important cutscenes insist they are. These usually serve as the motivating action and background to smaller character-centric stories, but here, it's all Homeworld 2 has. It's tremendously dull.

The gameplay of the solo campaign also leaves a lot to be desired. Even with a mod lowering difficulty, it was a grinder. The persistent fleet mechanic returns, but the rate of attrition seems much more important than in the original - I cycled my whole fleet up to frigates every mission. Capturing enemy ships is pointless, especially since the new marine frigates can't even help you exceed the population cap. Your fleet is a rolling set of tools rather than the last of your people, and you never build an emotional attachement to it.

The campaign also loves to throw you into stressful scenarios right out the bat. Now, the original did that too sometimes, but you decided when to move on to the next mission, giving you time to reorganize and rearm before jumping into the fray. In Homeworld 2, the current mission auto-finishes the moment you complete your last objective. You're barely ever given a moment's peace. Worse, a fair few mission have you defending NPCs or completing time-sensitive objectives, keeping you from turtling your way out. The original Homeworld had me restarting missions once I understood how to navigate specific challenges, but not as often as here. I understand this is meant for additional challenge, but the lack of difficulty selection and the sheer obtuseness of it all was grating.

Now, what is good about Homeworld 2? Well, for starters, the boyish glee at smashing massive fleets of spaceships against each other is intact. Seeing bullets, torpedoes and lasers fill the screen is great fun, and the Remastered Collection is probably some of the best space battles money can buy. I ranted about the difficulty and the grinder-like aspect of gameplay, but the rock-paper-scissors aspect of fleet building is still engaging, and coordinating various battlegroups on separate objectives sometimes gave me a real rush.

The art direction is as good as ever, combining the wild 70's spaceship shapes of Peter Elson, Chris Foss and John Harris with a Y2K minimalism and strong visual identities for each faction. There's also some wonderful, if sadly underused, skyboxes with intriguing Big Dumb Objects (maybe a remnant of when the game was to feature massive space structures that impacted gameplay).

Overall, Homeworld 2 is a mixed bag, best reserved for the diehard Homeworld fan, but still one I'm happy is out there and has gotten a remaster. I can't wait to see what's in store with Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak and the upcoming Homeworld 3.