Homeworld® Remastered Collection

Well what should i say? It is Space RTS at its finest. The Homeworld Series always was the crown jewel, when it comes to this niche of the RTS genre. So if you like Space, RTS, Spaceships, and spaceships in space in space battles packed into an RTS: THIS GAME IS A MUST BUY! IMPORTANT: At launch, the game was very flawed, BUT they've addressed with a HE-UGE patch! They even re-ballanced some of the old flaws the original had, like overly strong Battlecruisers. Version 2 of the game almost feels like a remaster of the remaster. It took them 8 months to get the feedback from the community and rewrite the engine, so the AI behaves more closely to the original first part of the series and the result: FORMATIONS WORK NOW!!! :D It took them some time, but here it is: Two of the greatest games of all time, remastered beautifully. It is really worth it!

I played Homeworld 1 remastered with no prior exposure to the series. At first blush, the game seemed amazing. The tutorials and first mission or two were a breeze, the music is beautiful, the artwork and ship modeling is serviceable, and the slow pace reminded me of Sins of a Solar Empire. Seeing your ships gather into a formation and march into battle is a delight, and the actual mechanics are interesting enough: do you destroy that ship or capture it; do you split your forces to get a tactical advantage at the risk of having your smaller wings destroyed, or not; and so on. But the game is brought down by entirely unnecessary papercuts that often compound. For example: * At the beginning of a mission, all of your units exit the mothership. This is especially risky for small, fragile ships like bombers. This will still happen even if you set the mothership to "keep units docked" in the previous mission. * At the beginning of a mission, all of your units are set to the "stand down" stance where, upon being attacked, they will neither run away or fight back. * During many cutscenes, enemies will close in on your forces and start attacking. You can see how the issues above compound, right? A mission starts, your units array themselves outside of the mothership in "stand down" stance, and then a cutscene starts during which time your fleet is murdered. The list of minor, infuriating issues goes on and on. * Repair corvettes and frigates won't automatically repair nearby units. They also can't be told to repair a control group. * Control groups are non-exclusive. That is, a unit can belong to multiple control groups (numbers 0-9 on the keyboard). * Unit special abilities can't be set to automatically fire. Not a problem for most units, but a *big* problem for e.g. the drone carrier whose special ability is its only attack. * If a small unit is told to attack a meteor, it will just... fly into it. ...and so on.

I consider Homeworld one of the best game I've ever played and I preordered this edition on Steam. This "remastered" edition totally broke the gameplay of the first game (mainly formations and tactics) and really cannot recommend the remastered edition to a fan of the original Homeworld. I was really disappointed by the remastered edition of the first game (except for the graphics that are really good in my opinion). Maybe it's worth if you don't have the original version (included here).

I have always played this game when I was only 15. now 15 years later and now I can experience this games again with state of the art graphics engine, High Res textures, High quality audio, and crisper animatics. and its all thanks to Relic that made this game a legend. I highly recommend it to command your fleets. Plus with a good modding system, I can experience Total conversion mods like Freespace Fleet Command, Star Wars Warlords, and custom mods that will adding units to make your battle unique.

I take issue with this statement: "As a free bonus, this collection also includes original, non-remastered versions of Homeworld Classic and Homeworld 2 Classic, preserving the purest form of the original releases with compatibility for modern operating systems. " Specifically, the word "preserving" is the one I take issue with. The original Homeworld had LAN play. Homeworld Classic does not, Gearbox inexplicably ripped it out. That's not preserving games, that's crippling them. Single player is still great, but the fact remains that for some people multiplayer was a large part of the experience, so 3 stars from me.