Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak

After getting this game in its original form, that is before 1.3 patch, the game was barely playable. I understand that devs meant it to be a flashy RTS but seriously, the game was so majestically out of balance that it was killing the whole fun of it. At least for me. Units can go puff in a blink of an eye, your resources were super scarce, their harvesting slow, the overall control live was resembling holding a sack of mad squirrels and special abilities were too slow to be useful. Great RTS, jeahhh. The patch 1.3 turned the table. The game now so much more controllable and enjoyable. Why? The pause button. Yes, it is an RTS-Pause genre now ;). The use of skills makes now actually sense! You can use tactics and all your resources with sense, Whow ;) somebody call the police. The pause in the campaign is simply must have in order to enjoy the game as much as it gets. The campaign itself is ok, not marvelous but ok. It is also very heavily scripted so if you know the triggers you can abuse them to the hearth content.

Visually good-looking. Framerate is mostly good, with jittering happening quite often. There's also a lot of bugs, particularly with the user interface and controls. Sometimes the mouse gets stuck in the "middle mouse button map drag", and sometimes the controls freeze entirely. Loading times are strangely long for a game of this type. There are too many cutscenes, most unskippable. Some cutscenes happen in "real time" while the game is playing, but the player's ability to control units is removed for the duration of the cutscene. This means it's possible to lose a whole army because a siege cruiser happened to bombard your troops during the cutscene. There's too much dialogue that tells the player what to do as opposed to letting the player make up their own decisions ("we better not go in that choke point as there's a siege cruiser behind it"). This is an RTS game where there's no need for strategy, as you're constantly told what to do. Am I the general, or someone just pressing buttons for the general? The story is fine, although the line-by-line writing is subpar. The story doesn't feel completed at the end. The missions were alright, although I thought they got worse towards the end. I didn't care for the missions with timers (artificial or literal) as opposed to the ones that allowed me to take as long as I wanted in the mission. I feel this is a common problem with modern RTS games, at least for me. Formations, a dear feature of the original homeworld, are gone. Now ordering units to attack to a point clusters them together, which often causes unnecessary casualties due to enemy artillery. Many units lose importance when better units are unlocked, a typical problem in many RTS games. When battlecruisers enter the field, there's little reason to build anything except them, support cruisers, artillery cruisers, and aircraft. Play if you want a pretty standard RTS that looks visually good and don't mind an occasional bug or two.

It is a Homeworld game. The music is there, the graphics and immense scale is there. But you already know the outcome of the story before you even start. And as far as gameplay goes, DoK is full of unoptimized good ideas. Tactics are meant to be a rock-paper-scissor game between unit types, with a dash of "king of the hill." But in practice, LAV's (paper) are pretty much a waste of money, and acquiring elevation is a chore because you cannot align them to optimze elevation and position with a single command. Unit formations are automatically based on the direction your units move from point A to point B, so if your angle is off, half of your units won't be using elevation correctly. Empire Earth, a shoddy Age of Empires copycat from 2001, did this better. When I think "Homeworld," I think of a slower paced RTS, so I have time to think about my tactics. All of that is flipped on its head in DoK. Despite the immense scale of the world and your units, skirmish maps are incredibly small, and production is fast. So the game is always on a frantic pace where you're trying to juggle terrain tactics and maintain a steady production. In both the story mode and skirmish, until you build a large enough force you can comfortably attack with, you will find yourself forced into frantically defending your position with no room to breathe. As with every other modern RTS, DoK is not friendly to classic casual turtle players, like myself. It wants you to play in a certain way, and you won't have a good time if you don't. There is also a lack of staple hotkeys, and what few are there can't be remapped. Verdict: This is a game for Homeworld enthusiasts and completionists. There is no real replay value in skirmish mode. And although there are lots of good ideas, the game is missing too many QoL functions to be good.

Everything you loved about the original Homeworld games from the aesthetic to the music (It's glorious) and gameplay, but this time set before the events of Homeworld on the desert planet of Kharak. Love the addition of random chatter. Hopefully that will be thing in Homeworld 3 as well. Issues with the game include not being able to rebind your keys and underwhelming AI.

I bought this game on sale and got way more than my money's worth - I really enjoyed playing a lot (I only play the campaign). Being a big fan of Command & Conquer or Red Alert games this appealed to me. The difference being in this game is that you don't build bases as you're always on the move through the desert sands. After some adjustment and restarting missions I got the hang of the game and on medium difficulty I was challenged but enjoyed playing - be warned that resources are not unlimited so plan ahead! I really love the background chatter of the crews, the music and arabian desert atmosphere to the game - it gave me a sense of an army of people, not just mindless units. Also, the fact I carried over my units and strike groups from each mission was really interesting and made me want to keep every unit I could alive. I see other reviews state the game crashed or wouldn't run, but I had no problems (Windows 10 64-bit with Intel Core i5, 8GB RAM and GeForce GTX 1650). For £3 I totally recommend this game!