Homeworld® Remastered Collection

Technically, the remastered edition is pretty good. Graphs are nice, musics are great. Now the games. Homeworld 1 is really good. You can enjoy the game. it's hard but it's okay, sometimes you have to try again but you'll finish to win. Homeworld 2, well, it's not the same. It's a lot discouraging. Each mission from the third is hard, very very hard. Sometimes you have to reload like 10 times a save, or retry 10 times the mission from its beginning to succeed. It's even sometime so ridiculous (like mission 4, one of the worst, waves and waves and waves of ennemies, without a single chance to win it if you don't have the PERFECT start). Well, i tried to advance, but i raged quit and desinstall at mission 6. There's no fun in trying more than 10 times each mission, that's just a mess.

Homeworld Remastered Collection I'd say is the least ideal way of playing Homeworld 1, especially since some functions such as giving commands to units, setting unit sizes, and the amount of enemies relative to your fleet size are borked as everything is running under Homeworld 2's engine; however, two solutions exist to fix this, the player's patch (which tries to continue off where the original developer patches left) and the original game files bundled into the install (I went with this option and used TenhauserGate, a source port for the game; however Windows users or those who simply want to run it as is will need to set compatibility to XP to even get things running). To the games themselves, I'd say Homeworld 1 is a masterpiece in space-RTS games, in part due to some great sound direction and a compelling plot; Homeworld 2 on the other hand, I didn't really care as much for, gameplay is fine but the story feels a lot less engaging and memorable than its predecessor so I never could get too into it. Overall? I'd say this is a package of good games marked by a slightly unbalanced and slapped together upgrade (sure the visuals are nice, but having to scuttle my fleet before each mission really sucks and decreases the sense of power you get).

I remember, as a child, seeing the box art and other graphics that were advertisments for these games when they were released (90s). The sight of ships fighting in space with an alien/robotic looking head along with the reviews I read created a fantasy in my head of an incredible journey and fight through space. Now at 27 years old, I finally have played Homeworld 1 Remastered and I am completely blown away by the game. The graphics, the music, the story, all completely helped my childhood fantasies of this game finally meet reality. And what a reality it is.

Homeworld is as close to a perfect game as I have ever played. The remaster refuses to run without catastrophic failures. "Access Violation" errors in every mission that cause the game to crash to desktop. I'm at a point where I have no ability to continue the game past mission 8 because when I enter the level the auto-launch of corvettes triggers the error. I've restarted the game from mission 1 twice with vastly different fleet composition each time and the "Access Violation" occurs no matter what on entering mission 8. The issue has apparently existed since the remaster was released and the devs know and have no intent of fixing. When the game works it's the best RTS game I've ever played. But I can't recommend this version.

Even after updates the game mechanics are still not the same as the original - like formations mattering or ballistics. Your money would be better spent getting Emergence (Cataclysm).