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Pros
Incredible Gameplay: The gameplay displayed in the original Homeworld was beyond words. This legacy continues in Cataclysm with even more zeal. The addition of a fog of war, crystals, and other matters to affect the strategic environment, the game is simply amazing, and not enough good can be said about it.
Detailed unit information
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They are distracting with a fighter assault, but you gotta wake up pretty early in the mid-evening
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Music: The musical genius of the original game has returned for our hearing pleasure once again. You might consider being a big dork and burning a copy of the music just to think upon. While the music isn't quite as good as the first Homeworld, it's still stellar for a stellar environment.
Graphics It's not your stereotypical view of good graphics, but the visual amalgam that the game presents is beautiful and chaotic. The individual scenes of arcs of lightning silhouetting a multibeam Frigate crackling with energy as its being converted to the Beast just as your frigates are leveling their beams at someone they once called brother is almost worthy of a Pulitzer. The visual aesthetic of the game follows an immense attention to detail and the rendering of an immersive universe.
Multiplayer Both the potential and the realistic yield of the multiplayer is wondrous with enough options to keep you playing it for years. The multiplayer of Cataclysm is comparable to a Warren Spector single player game. You will keep playing it, because there is so much to do and behold.
Highly stable Perhaps we were lucky, but for a game that makes use of as many advanced features as the Homeworld engine and the new spins put on it by Barking Dog, this game should have been crashing as much as any other cutting edge game. Cataclysm crashed once in the entirety of the review, and never during the multiplayer. Multiplayer tends to cause the most crashes in games, and we were very surprised to see the game didn't transpire once during our testing. Kudos to Barking Dog for a truly stable but still very innovative piece of software.
To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of the women folk
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Incoming capitals!
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Cons
Small Following: This might change when this review is published, but it's doubtful. At a month after its release, the multiplayer following for Cataclysm is incredibly minimal for such a fine product. You could play it for years, but the frustration of not being able to find a good game often might keep you at bay. LAN games in college dorms or offices are ideal alternatives to the small player base found on Sierra.com, but the LAN option isn't viable for everyone.
Story: Barking Dog tried very hard to continue the story laid out in the original Homeworld, in both the tradition of the story itself and its quality. Barking Dog has made a very large deal out of the storyline of Cataclysm. Let's be up front about it. The story is quite boring, the villain is typical, and the introduction of new aspects to the Homeworld universe is totally minimal. It's not that the dialogue or the writing itself was bad. It's just that the idea and the execution of the story were entirely ordinary with just a few twists that were entirely predictable.
Intelligence The single player campaign, besides the story, is a good selection of varied objectives, but relies too heavily upon the player playing the mission through at least once for simple recon.
Final verdict 
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