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3D Real Time Render Underwater Action Adventure Game

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Strategy & War

Homeworld: Cataclysm
Rating: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 best

CNET Gamecenter Review
By Jason Ocampo
(9/15/2000)

The good: Improved control interface; superb graphics; gorgeous space battles.
The bad: Clunky ship design; plot is fairly standard sci-fi fare.
The bottom line: Homeworld: Cataclysm is a bigger and better Homeworld, sure to excite any real-time strategy fan.
Multiplayer: Up to eight players.
ESRB rating: E (Everyone)
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Homeworld: Cataclysm is the game that the original Homeworld should have been. That's not to say that the original was a horrible game--in fact, it was almost revolutionary, introducing the Z-axis to real-time strategy games and mating this innovation with lush graphics. But the game was also hampered by quite a few action-less moments and an interface that was clunky at times. Homeworld: Cataclysm rectifies most of the original's faults while adding a number of subtle new features that make it one of the rare sequels that improves upon the original.

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Beast-ly
Homeworld: Cataclysm picks up where Homeworld left off. The Hiigarans have settled down on their lost homeworld and are slowly rebuilding their civilization. The Taiidan have fractured into two factions: the warlike, expansionist imperialists out to crush the Hiigarans and the peaceful republicans who want to atone for their species' past sins. In the midst of one of the many flare-ups that occur between the Hiigarans and the imperialist Taiidan, the Kuun-Lan, a Hiigaran mining vessel, stumbles upon a mysterious piece of space debris infected by the Beast virus, which is a cross between Ebola and Star Trek's Borg. When the Beast infects a vessel, it turns both the ship and its crew into a biomechanical member of its race with the potential to infect other ships. Of course, that's bad news to just about everyone else in the galaxy, so the race is on to stop the infection before it gets out of control. And yes, the plot does sound a bit like standard sci-fi fare, but it's well done, with solid voice acting backing it up.
Your main ship, the Kuun-Lan, performs many of the same duties that the mothership did in Homeworld. You can research new technologies, build more advanced ships, and serve as a repair bay and hangar for all your fighters. Since Cataclysm is set 15 years after Homeworld, there are many new fighter and ship designs, some of which are certainly surprising; we weren't expecting much out of tiny micro-capital ships such as the Sentinel, but just build ten of them and see the kind of damage they can inflict, and you'll be sold on their effectiveness.

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Homeworld: Cataclysm

Homeworld: Cataclysm

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