Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

If the campaign went maybe 3 or 4 more missions, I think this would have been a 5/5 for me. A lot of your favorite concepts from Homeworld are reflected here. Mobile home base, persistent units and resources, researching new units and upgrades for them. To a small degree, there's some concern for the 3D environment as well, though far from the full 3D of the original Homeworld, but it was a nice touch seeking out the high ground in encounters, or setting up small ambushes around hills and sand dunes. The difficulty is a bit on the high side, and initially I was a bit irked by the AI having constantly spawning units versus a set number that, when destroyed, were done. I enjoyed the missions and variety, the addition of sort of special abilities for different units, and the inclusion of air-strike units from your base. I think graphically it holds up considering it's almost a decade old at this point, and I experienced no issues running it, and the cutscenes have that Homeworld-esque style that I enjoy. Solid music as well for an RTS! Easy recommend for anyone who enjoys the genre, just wish the campaign were a little longer to keep diving deeper into the universe. Lots of those "Oh.... OH." moments that Homeworld had and spoiled us with.

Missions get harder and harder as you go. Learn to pick up resources as you go. When resources are depleted, you can salvage your collectors for more units. Keep PDS units to a minimum because you are always on the move. Excellent game but a bit too fast for my liking as you have to be on your toes the entire time. Edge of your seat play on normal setting.

Pretty good game. I picked this game up a while ago on sale and just now got around to it. I have played Homeworld and Homeworld 2, and I think this fits in nicely. Some of the missions can be a bit of a slog when you are waiting on cooldowns, but otherwise I really enjoyed it. I did not play any multiplayer, only the campaign.

I've been a huge fan of STR back in the days. Deserts of Kharak is an interesteting prequel to Homeworld, the narration is great, the graphics are beautiful and the game performances overall is fine. However, the game suffers from design issues that seems inherited from homeworld and which, for me, makes it boring: - Units controls is really annoying, units can be stacked in several different groups, which is great, but it's a chore to remove them, so if you accidentally added an unit to a group, or want to rework a group without totally dismantling it, you can't. - The overview is too small, having a clear picture of what is happening is nearly impossible, moreoever, there's no minimap - The game is heavilly scripted. It's great that STR evolved from the time when the good strategy was to zerg the ennemy, even if it was cool. In Karhak, ressources are incredibely limited and ennemies come by waves, after checkpoints in the game, they have no base. So basically you cannot have a real influence on the scenario. Make sure to prepare yourself as necessary, deplete ressources to the maximum, then trigger the checkpoint. If for some reason your units setup is not good then ... meh, restart it. For this kind of dynamic, turns by turns game are more appropriate. Here, not only it makes the game boring, but it also seems like a gamble at some points. - Units transfering from one world to another is great, but the ressources are so limited that you can cumulate a debt over and over the mission and then having to start over, or to start with default ressources. So hey, well, I remember I did not complete Homeworld back in the days because it was cool but incredibly hard to control and too scripted, I am going to finish that game but I'm not having so much fun with it.

A tightly paced campaign where your desert crawler and it's forces steadily gain power over each mission as you salvage artefacts strewn across the desert. The plot is based around finding the guidestone, your giant desert crawler and hero unit support craft journey across the vast desert and the opponents within to reach it. Even during missions you continually move your entire 'base' across the map as you hoover up more supplies, constantly moving forwards. The deserts themselves make for good rts terrain, where controlling dune ridges lets you make or break line of sight with your enemies below at your leisure. In other cases, railguns seem to be the dominant unit across an open plain, unless they are swarmed by light attack vehicles. And at least in the context of the campaign, air support is the "need emergency damage here" button. The management aspects have been simplified, no longer needing different production modules built before creating unit classes or research modules to actually perform research. You simply research the new units or upgrades as they become available to unlock them. The carrier also gets to spend power allocation across 4 different systems depending on what you need the carrier to do at the time. Unit dialogue and idle dialogue is great. Really great, with different lines reads based on if the unit is currently in combat or not. Music is great. Only negatives would be sometimes worker units are pretty bad at keeping themselves busy. And trying to find and select idle workers is painful. Also Rachel's pathfinding killed her when running away from the exploding base one time, the pathfinding in general is passable but can fail sometimes when getting a move order through an impassable object. The only thing missing is some sort of semi-randomised mini campaign to replicate the feeling of progression across the desert, that could be tackled with any of the factions. Then a co-op varient of the mini campaign.