Homeworld 3 (DEMO)

Homeworld 3 was one of my most highly anticipated games this year – at least until I played this demo. The original Homeworld was one of the first PC games I played. I absolutely loved it, and I still have my big, bulky boxed copy on my shelf alongside the Cataclysm expansion and Homeworld 2. Although the Homeworld Remastered release in 2015 wasn’t perfect, it still made me hopeful for a possible Homeworld 3.

And then we had Deserts of Kharak in 2016 which I thought was a pretty good land-based prequel to Homeworld and something that also gave me hope for future games in the series. And when Homeworld 3 was announced, I thought we’d get a game that did the name justice. But now? Now I’m not so sure.

There was something that immediately felt ‘off’ when starting to play this demo. Everything about the controls just felt wrong and I just don’t get why they changed a system that worked perfectly in the originals. The ‘modern’ – and even the ‘classic’ – controls just didn’t feel right. The camera movement felt slow despite cranking the speeds up to max.

Everything just felt more convoluted and complicated than it needed to be. I felt like I spent most of my time struggling with the controls to get the camera focused where I wanted it to be, or to get my ships to fly exactly where I wanted them to go. Maybe I just needed more time to adjust? Maybe, but the controls weren’t the only problem.

The UI is too messy and intrusive. Building, ship costs, research, fleet population – nothing is easy to read at a glance. And not only does it look messy, but it feels messy to play. Maybe it’s just this game mode available in the demo but everything feels faster paced than the originals and I’d be okay with that if the controls and fleet mechanics were adjusted to compensate.

But when strike craft are once again individual units to be grouped and assigned – and adding even a single new craft to an existing group resets the group formation – you don’t feel like you can adequately respond as quickly as you need to when you have to continually micromanage every single unit, group and formation. It just doesn’t translate well to a faster paced style of play.

Combat engagements are typically chaotic (and not in a good way), formations quickly lose cohesion, and grouping multiple ship types is a mess in a larger scale battle because they don’t seem capable of individually prioritising the most suitable targets.

Which would be fine, in a slower paced game, but in this (demo) mode at least, everything moves so fast that you don’t feel like you can really focus on individual unit tactics – it’s just group up, select all enemies and watch the fireworks.

Ship AI is also pretty bad. All the maps I played in the demo were strewn with physical objects both large and small that my ships had trouble navigating around. They’d frequently get stuck, or bunch up, or take a long, convoluted path to their objective. It can be even worse in combat when enemy (or your) ships just fly into the middle of a group and sit there getting pounded. The larger space structures can also make seeing what the f**k is going on a real nightmare.

Overall, I just didn’t really enjoy it and I really do hate to feel that way. But it seems like I’m not alone with my disappointment because the game has now been delayed due to feedback. But will it be enough time to fix all of these issues? I hope so.