The game’s starship classes, running from the highly mobile but lowly fighters to the lumberous, gigantic but powerful capital ships, give space battles an epic scale and choosing the right fleet composition quickly becomes the key to success. Your fleet, centred around the colossal mothership, is vulnerable to attacks from above or below the primary plane while tactical exploitation of the same z-axis can allow your ships to drop in on the enemy unexpected. The core RTS mechanics of base-building, resource gathering, research and combat take on a new level of depth and complexity with the introduction of the third dimension. Barber’s Agnus Dei, a choral arrangement of Adagio for Strings, dominates the game’s soundtrack and lends gravitas and poignancy to the struggles of the Kushan in a genocidal conflict with their arch-rivals the Taiidan Empire.Įven a decade and a half on, it’s striking just how fresh and revolutionary Homeworld’s gameplay systems feel. Inspired by the original Battlestar Galactica television series, the game shares much with the 2004 reboot not only in terms of overarching plot but in visual aesthetic, sound design and music. Homeworld is space opera writ large, the story of the Kushan people’s journey across the stars to find a mythical place of origin. Now, to drum up anticipation for their promised reprisal, Homeworld: Shipbreakers, Gearbox have packaged up remastered versions of the first two Homeworld titles and a standalone multiplayer mode, releasing the lot to eager PC gamers. The franchise lay dormant for a decade before it was purchased by developer Gearbox Software at auction after the demise of publisher THQ. The last of the series, Homeworld 2, was released in 2003 and the strategy gaming community has clamoured for another sequel ever since. Back in 1999, when top-down titles like Starcraft, Total Annihilation and Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun dominated the strategy niche, Relic Entertainment’s Homeworld was bravely pushing the genre where no game had gone before: into true, fully navigable three-dimensional space on a scale where missions spanned whole star systems and campaigns an entire galaxy. The phrase ‘ahead of its time’ is one that’s thrown around far too often in gaming and technology circles but if ever there was a game that turned its back on genre convention and rewrote the rulebook, it was PC real-time strategy classic Homeworld.
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