Homeworld is a real-time strategy game that puts you in command of a huge mothership on a long voyage home. After much research your people’s scientists an archaeologists have found that the planet they lived on is not their planet of origin. An ancient tablet is found with information that leads to the building of the mothership and, for the first time for your people, hyperspace capabilities. However it soon becomes clear that not all of the neighbouring systems’ inhabitants are happy that this capability has been developed, and begin to oppose you in any way they can…

I’ve actually had this game for quite a while, but never managed to get working. It always came up with an error message, saying that the CD-ROM wasn’t authenticated. Having seen on the Sold Out Software that some of the serial numbers weren’t correct, I emailed them asking for a new number; however they insisted that the one I had was correct. Months passed… I tried reinstalling it recently and still no joy. Then on a sudden whim I tried the disc in the DVD-ROM , and voila! It worked fine. So if you have this game and have that problem, try it!

Anyway, back to the game. Basically you are in charge of this mothership, and the game consists of gathering and managing resources, building spaceships, researching new technologies (mainly new ships), and achieve certain objectives. The game consists of 16 missions; basically 16 different systems in which you must achieve the game objectives (and protect the mothership). These vary widely from system to system, but essentially you need to gather resources, research new technologies, and defeat the enemy craft / attain the particular new technology that you need. In the early stages this might just mean sending some resource collectors out to mine the nearest asteroids and research an Interceptor spaceship; later on it gets far more complicated as enemies – and allies – appear on the scene. Diplomacy doesn’t often help with the enemies, they just nee to be defeated but this isn’t always easy. The further into the game you get, the more involved and difficult what you need to do gets for each scenario.

The resource management side of the game is very simple, there is only one resource type and one way of gathering it. Likewise combat is pretty simple – just select your ships to attack with, select who to attack, and let the game get on with it. Similarly with research, just tell it what to research and the research will go on in the background. This level of initial simplicity would be too basic for a 2D turn-based game, but in real-time in 3 dimensions it works well. Where the complexity comes in is in the variety of different spaceships that can be designed and built, and in the different formations that they can be set in. It really is necessary to learn (or find out) what formation types work best for attack / defence, and which formation is best for which craft type.

The story itself is fairly basic sci-fi fare, but is well told and the cut sequences are nicely animated and very stylish. When the game goes into a smaller cut-scene (within a mission as opposed to between missions), the game goes into widescreen mode, which was a nice touch. Overall the storyline really did enhance the atmosphere of the gaming experience.

Initially I though the graphics were extremely dated (forgivable for a 1999 game perhaps), but after looking at the options I realised that as a default it uses software rendering. When I changed this to my primary display driver and upped the colour depth, it looked a million times better. The graphics are in fact very good (unless you’re at the lower end of the system specs), and really give added atmosphere. What really impressed me though was the sound – the very clear speech samples and good voice acting (apart from one or two bit-parts, i.e. a distress call sent out where the distressed caller doesn’t sound in the least distressed!!), and the soundtrack is very, very moody, often using classical choral arias which is unusual for a computer game (I thought, anyway) but works extremely well. It all adds up to make this game very atmospheric – yes that word again, funny since it’s set in space which is outside any atmosphere…

The gameplay mechanics in general are very easy to get to grips with, and the tutorial is well designed, showing you how to do things quickly and effectively. Where I found the game to fall down slightly was that the ships quite often didn’t seem to actually do what I told them – it sometimes took several attempts to get them to do it (this after making sure I was actually doing it right – I was). This can be frustrating, especially when things are happening quickly. The action really does heat up at times although somehow I felt a little distant from what was happening, partly due to the simplicity of the controls, partly due to them not always seeming to work. The learning curve within the game itself is quite steep, and on occasion you might need to go back to an earlier mission and do that better to be able to complete the next one, as your ships carry over from one mission to the next. The game can be saved at any time and autosaves at the start of each mission.

Overall, Homeworld is a very good game with tons of atmosphere, but there were times when I really did get frustrated with the controls. The single-player game will take you a long time to complete (some may find It somewhat too linear though I didn’t), and there’s a multiplayer mode as well for up to 8 players over the internet. Now that it’s out as a budget title from Sold Out Software, there really is no reason for anyone who likes real-time strategy games not to get this.

Initially released by: Sierra
Developed by: Relic Entertainment


Minimum System Specs

CPU: Pentium 200MHz
OS: Windows 95 / 98 / Me / XP
RAM: 32Mb
Graphics card: 4Mb 16-bit colour
DirectX ?version
HDD space: 100Mb (plus 50Mb for swap files)

Tested On:

OS: Windows XP Home Edition SP2
CPU: Pentium 4 2.4GHz
RAM: 768Mb
Graphics card: 256Mb (GeForce 5500 FX)
DirectX 9.0c


More Real-Time Strategy:

Shogun: Total War: Warlords Edition


Recommended: Yes