I return to it to play from time to time, and strangely enough, the experience always seems fresh. It's certainly not for everyone - but if you ever played text-only adventures, or enjoyed a good book, and can therefore provide livid enough fantasy to allow the game to conjure up a captivating story, it can provide a good amount of entertainment. It's certainly well written, and focused enough to deliver. People will no doubt complain about the lack of graphics or gameplay variety or minigames, or whatever, but would you ever complain that a one-bite snack is not a whole cauldron of broth? Each has its own purpose, and each has its own place.
If the programmer and the writer is the same person, the game usually has a problem. Which is exactly the case here - while the pixel art is serviceable, and the atmosphere decent, and the soundtrack good, the writing is on par with high school jokes (random pop culture references and puns), and brings the whole game down. If you compare it to Blackwell Series, which costed about as much per episode, it's clearly not competitive quality-wise.
It's fantastic it still works on modern computgers!
If I find solutions for the problems below, I will update my review. NO WIDESCREEN SUPPORT - game runs ony on several predetermined resolutions, 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200. That means that on the most common gaming resolution, 1920x1080, you will have to run the game in a centered, non-scaled rather small box. That's very strange since the original Homeworld could be switched into any resolution via a simple command line parameter TEXTURE FILTRATION DOES NOT WORK - no matter what renderer you select, textures are not filtered and will appear "pixelized" like on old software rendered games. Pretty ugly.
Sadly, this is a torso of a game, since the intro, outro, and no ingame cinematics work in the game. It feels like playing a cheap pirated copy. Since the store page does not mention the product is incomplete, this review hopes to supplement this information. I will change my review once the game is patched so that the FMV work.
One would think the customers will grow tired of buying the same broken game over and over again.
Overpriced, RNG-based garbage peddled under the pretense of "old school" graphics and rogue-like-like premise that atrocious game design is okay, as long as you die often enough. You basically trudge across an empty hex-based map, and RNG things "happen" to you over which you have zero control. Somebody once said that good games present difficult and interesting choices to the player. Well, that's exactly what this game does not do. Every expedition is the same, every encounter is the same, every temple you rob causes natural disaster (why?), and each expedition ends up with a golden pyramid (what?), after which you are miraculously teleported to London. There is zero reasons to play this.
Since I am very interested in the topic of oil production and its history, I decided to give the game a go. However, the game is a very simplistic time-management chore, presented by nice graphics, but overall resembling a mobile game. Do not expect any depth or historic realism, just 2-d drilling, flow management and selling to the highest bidder, rinse and repeat over and over, with a few straightforward upgrades tossed in to freshen up the grind a bit.
I don't know about other people, but the writing just killed the game for me. Listening supposedly "tough" characters that swear as ridiculously as 14 old teens trying to act as gangsters just means the immersion is totally gone. Next time, hire a native English speaker to at least proof-read the translation, or better yet, native English speaker that understands Japanese, and you will get a palatable result.
The strongest asset of the game is undoubtedly the graphics. From the very beginning, you are presented with a nicely done, detailed planet surface, and a module landing to found a new space colony. However, the game makes similar mistakes as Banished. First of all, it's extremely dry and lifeless. Your crew consists of humans and robots, but maybe the humans are robots also, because besides names and few physical traits, they basically lack any defining characteristics. They never display emotions, never talk, never do anything unique. Secondly, though you control basically a community of survivors (as in Banished), they absolutely refuse to improvise, which is a key trait of successful survivors. Crews of space missions are actually trained to be able to do everything in emergency - but not in this game. Your sole worker qualified to hold a button on a production machine died? Too bad for you, his buddy medic won't touch that button, so no more metal for you, ever, and your mission is doomed. Last biologist died? Tough luck, nearby workers twiddle their thumbs instead of tending that patch of onions, and calmly starve out. Everything is very expensive, and everything lasts forever. Usually, a bottleneck in a supply chain forms you cannot solve (the game lacks any sort of actually controlling your colonists), so you just watch that single ingot of metal you need for the next building to be slowly shuffled to its destination. Colonists interrupt their tasks once a slightest need disturbs them. A bit hungry? Stop working, and off to the cantine! Then return, do 4 percent of your task, until you realize you forgot to drink! Then it's time to sleep, since you are only 70 percent rested! And while walking, eating and drinking takes realistic amount of time, the actual time passes many time faster, so nothing ever gets done during a day. You lack flexibility in reasigning both workforce and ramping up production capabilities, so the game mostly ends up in frustration. And even though you finally build the super expensive telescope... and laser to protect you from the constant meteors... and a security room... and a security console, you get only 40 percent chance your investment will protect your base! That is if you are lucky. If you are not, your console operator goes to eat, dring, sleep or take a leak, and if a meteor strikes in this period of time, you are done for.
