I was bored and waiting for a train one day in August and saw an issue of PC Gamer, a "100 Greatest PC Games" special issue. Homeworld Remastered was at spot number 62. I tend to suck at RTS but I added it to my wishlist for later. I impulsively bought it the other day, after games higher in PC Gamer's list didn't quite click with me, and it's shaping up to be one of my best purchases on Steam ever.

You play as a race of peoples whose culture and history have been erased, but have managed to preserve a map to their ancestral homeworld. Your attempts to reach the homeworld are resisted by an Empire, with whom your people have had contact thousands of years prior. The story is wonderfully enigmatic, and poignant, and thrilling. There's a curious religious element several stages in, which I also won't spoil. Mission objectives are varied, with unexpected twists and emergency changes of plan when things often go awry. The interfaces are beautiful and clean, and the mechanics of the game are fairly easy to pick up, with a short tutorial that should cover everything you need to know.

So yeah.

TL;DR -- Doesn't matter if you're not a strategy or RTS buff. Unless you don't like space and are allergic to fun buy this now.

P.S. And if you're curious how this game looked in 1999, you have the option to play each of the games in classic mode.

P.P.S. Damn Homeworld II is way harder than Homeworld I ;_;

Everything I remembered it to be and more. I remembered the tight controls and surprisingly simple style for tactics (BTW definitely play the tutorial). I remembered how cool it looked to send squadrons of ships in claw formations against enemy carriers (which looks amazing now compared to then). And I remembered how the game gives you simple missions at first to ease you into the action. But I forgot (I'm not sure how) the gripping narratives of the two games. I was immediately sucked back into the journey across the galaxy and the aggressive response to enemy threats.
Now I've barely touched the remastered game thus far: hardly restarted the story as of writing this. It may be early for a review. They could have bugs further on that I don't know about yet. So far it's played smooth and error free (despite turning my gaming laptop into a blast furnace). But I've played through the old versions before and this stands up to and exceeds my expectations for a modernization.
Pros:
.Gripping story
.tight controls
.great visuals
.gentle learning curve (simple missions at first familiarizing you with the game)
.Bug free and plays smooth.
.Two games plus expansions in one!
Cons:
.You better play the tutorial or that gentle learning curve is going to be much steeper.
.new visuals (outside of the new lighting and weapon effects) are simply hi-res textures pasted onto relatively simple ship models from the original game so don't expect elite dangerous graphics.
.You don't own it yet.

The best space opera in gaming history! Apsolutley genius art direction, design, music, campaign. Amazing piece of classic cult hit perfectly remastered! This is how you remaster a game!
ONE OF THE BEST GAMES EVER MADE!

Art.


If you plan on playing this to the end (which you should), search for the restored credits with the song from Yes, you can find it on youtube, as a Homeworld veteran, finishing this game after more than 10 years and seeing those credits roll up with that song almost brought a tear to my eye.

The new patch fixed up pretty much everything wrong with the gameplay.

The result is one of the most amazing experiences you can have with a videogame.

"We follow the sun, we follow the sun, we follow the sun..."

Still playing the single player, I heard multiplayer sucks? Not sure, don't care. So far everything is nice.

A very well done revision of an already excellent game. If you have a mind for strategy, I can't recommend it enough. It been one of my all time favorites for a long time and its looking like that will continue.

Still an unbeaten classic and just as brilliant now as when it first came out , strangely the updated graphics can be a bit glitchy.
If you love an epic space game with a bit of command and conquer , then this is the game for you.

wow.. what took me so long to get this?

Star trek star wars and star gate nuff said

Playing Homeworld is a great way to switch off and indulge in an evening of forgettable relaxation. The colourful space vistas, twisting neon engine trails, and soft explosions all come together to create a dreamy feel – which is just as well given how soporific the gameplay is.

Like other space RTS games, Homeworld removes the genre staple of terrain but provides nothing to replace it. Your activities will be managing bog standard rock/paper/scissors unit counters while gathering a single resource type. 3D movement is one of the USPs but it adds very little: in the vacuum it's just a slightly more fiddly movement direction, albeit one which grants your ships an arbitrary damage bonus to targets above or below their own plane.

The most you'll need to think about 3D movement is when positioning capital ships, most of which can only fire in front of them and all of which turn slowly. Unfortunately you can't explicitly set ship facing, making planning ahead a challenge, and during combat capital ships can veer off-target if their pathfinding AI decides that it needs to steer around an obstacle. With capital ship battles often decided by the direction in which each ship is pointing, this easily becomes a pain point.

Otherwise ships can either fire in all directions or turn quickly enough that their current facing doesn't matter. There is no apparent bonus for hitting ships from the rear unless you are specifically trying to disable their engines, a niche activity given how slowly ships large enough to have targetable sub-systems move. There really is vanishingly little else to discuss at a high level.

The automatic difficulty scaling of the campaign, in which the number of enemy opponents changes depending on how many ships you carry over from the previous mission, was ahead of its time. Unfortunately the AI will simply clump all its ships of the same type together and order them about as one unit, which actually makes the campaign easier as it progresses due to the slower response times required by larger battles. You'll coast through the campaigns until their final missions, which both spike difficulty up to the same obscene level. They are disasters and I would suggest just watching the closing cut-scenes online instead of bothering with either.

I paid £9 for the game when it was on sale and am not unhappy with that. But I cannot recommend it for £27 nearly two years after release.

(I didn't play online, but I hear that it's dead.)