Admirably, the interface does all of this without getting in the way of the action - even the build and research menus are mostly kept collapsed and out of sight. The toughest trick is giving orders to travel to a specific point in space - you have to give a move order, then hold Shift to adjust the altitude, and you have to constantly shift the camera around to get a sense of depth. Zooming out to a tactical view of the area and giving orders to control groups makes things manageable, and double-clicking to select every unit of a type lets you take command of fast-moving and scattered ships. Homeworld’s interface does a good job of helping you wrangle your forces, though, especially now that many of Homeworld 2’s improvements have been retrofitted to the original. Getting used to tethering the free-floating camera to ships or objects in the area you’re interested in is the equivalent of finding your sea legs when you’re accustomed to having solid ground under your feet. Controlling fleets that can move freely in full-3D space is challenging to get the hang of, and it can be difficult to even figure out what’s going on when two armadas of fighters, bombers, and corvettes are all swirling around in a giant furball of a dogfight around frigates, destroyers, battlecruisers, carriers, and the massive mothership itself. A good-sized engagement of a few dozen ships is like a ballet mixed with a fireworks display of violent explosions, lighting up the already colorful nebula-tinged skyboxes like a laser show.Homeworld and Homeworld 2 definitely aren’t simple games, but their complexity is the rewarding kind. That breathtaking attention to detail, along with the newly refreshed models, textures, and effects highlight the creatively distinctive and often asymmetrical spaceship designs.
The way fighters strafe and weave in combat is really impressive – they almost never have physics-breaking bumper-car collisions – and I adore watching individual turrets on larger ships track their targets. But of course I did play Homeworld in 1999, and a great many games since, yet these two 15-hour campaigns are still some of the best large-scale space battles I’ve ever taken part in.
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