Reviewer: Christopher E. Johnson

Uh Oh, Not Another 3D RTS Game!

The universe awaits!

Innovation is a curse in the real time strategy genre. Any deviation from the conventional "build resources, upgrade technology, build army, and attack enemy" RTS model is punished usually through poor retail sales. Some of these deviations are met with skepticism from the gaming press but many new ideas are heralded as great improvements to RTS games. 3D graphics are all the rage in RTS-land and some games do them better than others. RTS game play improvements are few and far between, although Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors and Warlords Battlecry come to mind as RTS games that push the creativity envelope. The first RTS game to really push the genre in a different direction was Myth, but it was much too tactical to be considered a true RTS title. The game that in my view showed what could be done differently in RTS games (and could have decent sales) was Sierra's Homeworld. Other games like Battlezone and Uprising were interesting titles. However, Homeworld was critically acclaimed (including by you, our readers, in our Strategy Game of the Year poll last year) and sold enough copies that Sierra saw fit to publish a sequel.

Homeworld: Cataclysm is the next game in the Homeworld series and continues the Battlestar Gallactica-like saga. One of the things that I never liked about Homeworld was its very awkward user interface. I always felt that there was a great game hidden beneath an odd set of user controls. One of the things that Barking Dog Studios set out to do in Homeworld: Cataclysm was to improve the interface based on many fan-recommended changes and add some new twists and features to the sequel. Relic, who made the original game, is now working on a new innovative RTS called Sigma. The question that potential buyers should ask is: Is this a true sequel or just an expensive expansion pack?

Let's Do The Math

Fast forwarding 15 years into the future, Homeworld: Cataclysm has a much deeper setting than the original. Instead of simply being a galactic lone ranger looking for a home, you now are in charge of a mining vessel that is part of one of the new factions that exist in the game. The manual contains 13 pages of background story that sets the mood and describes the events that led to the creation of the Taidan Republic and its warring factions. A new enemy, the Beast, rears its ugly head during the campaigns and is available as a multiplayer race choice. These creatures are Borg-like in that they infect your ships with a nano-virus; your vessel and crew are then "assimilated" and can be controlled by the Beast player. The plot is more complex than found in most RTS games and much richer than in the previous version of the game. It isn't breaking any new ground, but there's a lot going on in Homeworld: Cataclysm.

Can control your forces from one screen

I didn't have any problems loading the game and starting it up on the first try. I'd suggest that everyone, even Homeworld veterans, take some time and go through the excellent tutorial before heading off into the 17 campaign missions. The interface is much improved over the original and is showcased nicely in the tutorial missions. The most impressive changes are found in the sensor manager, which now mimics the command and control features used by real world Navies to tactically control ships in a fleet. Fans of the latest version of Battlecruiser 2000AD will feel right at home with the sensor manager because you can issue commands and do just about everything you need to do from the sensor manager screen as you can from the TACOPS screen in Battlecruiser 2000AD. I really, really did not like Homeworld's interface and the changes are quite remarkable between it and the sequel. Multiple windows are no longer needed to control the action and you can literally play the entire game from the sensor manager.

The sensor manager allows you to see all of the activity taking place within sensor range of your friendly ships. Enemy ships appear in red in the campaigns (and other colors in the multiplayer game) and their movement toward your ship can be tracked on screen. Right clicking on the manager screen opens a sub-menu that shows various orders you can give to your ships, including the move command. There are hot keys that are linked to ship orders. Hitting the M key opens a movement disk that allows you to plot the 2D distance and 3D height you want your ships to move and they will execute the order. Use the right click menu to set waypoints (a new, welcomed feature) and the aggressiveness level of your ships. The sensor manager can be configured to display all sorts of specific information on the screen through a right-click menu or hot keys. Resources, slipgate paths (discussed further below), dust, and other objects can be displayed. When you need to build more vehicles or research new technology, you can right click or use hot keys to open the build or research managers. I rarely left the sensor screen during my games.

The campaigns included in Homeworld: Cataclysm have a much different pace than those in the original. You start as a lone mining mothership vessel coming to the aid of some friendly units and along the way you encounter some interesting plot twists. Gone is the Battlestar Gallactica/ET phone home feeling that you got while playing the original. You're no longer the sole mothership searching through the galaxy for your next home. Now you find yourself immersed in the mundane problems that usually hit civilizations in politically correct futuristic galaxies. The campaign missions are much faster paced than the original and you will encounter goal after new goal after new goal in order to complete one mission. Some Homeworld veterans may not like the pacing of the new missions because they definitely feel much closer to Battlezone II RTS/action than to the longer and slower old missions. I enjoy both types of RTS campaigns so I didn't have many complaints, although the missions did feel a little puzzle-oriented at times.

Look at the pretty pictures

Homeworld: Cataclysm is a multimedia extravaganza. That's the only way I can describe it. If you want to see how a 3D game can make RTS games fun to play, the this is the game to purchase. The setting is perfect because with multi-axis movement and combat in the game, good 3D graphics will further enhance the player's game play experience. The detail in Homeworld: Cataclysm's graphics can only be appreciated if you zoom out from a single ship and then zoom in as closely as possible. You can see all sorts of detail that is even better than the original. The only area where the graphics suffer is in depicting damage to ships, but even this is better rendered than in the original title. There's a new pilot level view that allows you to see what the pilot of an individual vessel sees. You get to watch some pretty spectacular combat footage if you choose this view. On the other hand, I followed one of my ships inside the mothership using the pilot view while I was retiring the ship and saw some nasty graphical mess inside. Oh well, can't have everything I guess. The voice acting and cut scenes are nicely done and are the standard for 3D RTS games.

Easy to use tutorial

There are quite a few changes in game play that are worth mentioning. Your mothership can now move in the single player game, but the most important change is that the ship can be upgraded. Different technology modules are added to the command ship and these lead to additional potential upgrades to individual ships. Speaking of ships, gone are the harvesters, repair ships, and salvage vehicles. These ships are replaced by a "worker" vessel that combines all of the previous functions into one ship. There is a limitation on the number of ships you can use at one time, so the combination of the previous functions into one worker makes some sense. There are supply limits to the number of ships you can make. The idea behind this is that each ship requires a certain amount of support in order to keep it going. You will be able to visually gauge how much support you have available on the ship building manager screen, but this leads to some real changes in your previous Homeworld strategies. The "assemble a huge fleet of harvester and salvage ships" strategy won't work too well in Homeworld: Cataclysm because even if you salvage ships, the supply limits apply.

There is a fog of war in the game that limits your ability to see other ships. In addition to the waypoint system, a new slipgate system is included in the game that allows ships to hyperspace jump between fixed points in space. These points are pre-defined on the maps and you must find them in order to use them. Once found, they will be displayed on the sensor manager screen. A new resource crystal is available for harvesting when you have a certain level of technology to do it. Crystals yield more resources than the normal source.

Campaign briefing

The multiplayer portion of Homeworld: Cataclysm is excellent and is very challenging against good human opponents. The skirmish AI against computer opponents is improved but still has some holes that were found in the original. The computer does not do a good job of managing the somewhat complex technology tree and this can lead to strange results. Even when setting the AI difficulty at its highest levels, the computer will build ships (mimics) and fail to equip a key attribute (quantum explosive charge, for example). Special ship functions just do not seem to be part of the AI's decision choices. You can use the resource injection option that gets rid of the harvesting function and each side is given a set amount of resources that is provided during the course of the game or as a lump sum. This makes the skirmish games more challenging as the AI has one less thing to manage in the game. Against humans, you can play as the Beasts or as the Soomtaaw in ten different scenarios. There are no random maps but there are random start points.

New Game Or Expansion?

Lots of options

In addition to all of the changes mentioned above, there are some other new ship types worth special mention. The Mimic is a nice new ship that can project a 3D hologram to make it look like any strike or corvette class ship. They can be used as suicide ships to infiltrate deeply into enemy space and detonate themselves next to an unsuspecting foe. There are also variations of the Mimic ship that are formed when linked with another Mimic ship and they provide a bigger bang than the smaller ship. The new ship I like the best is the Leech breaching pod. You can send these ships out and they will evade sensors in order to clamp themselves undetected onto the enemy's hull. You now can track all of the enemy's movements and you can slowly reduce the hull integrity of the ship without the enemy noticing it until it is too late. This is a nasty ship to use in multiplayer games. There are 18 new ship types and 25 new technologies in Homeworld: Cataclysm.

An excellent 144-page manual (of which 134 are useful pages) that clearly explains how to play the game, shows technology trees and ship characteristics is included in the game and further enhances its overall value. How do I determine this value? My criteria are very simple. While I was playing Homeworld: Cataclysm I continuously asked myself: Am I playing a different game than the original? We're not discussing an improvement over the original, because that is what upgrades and patches are for. I am looking for a new gaming experience and one that is different than the original. It may not be better than the original or it may be quite good, but the key distinguishing factor is different game play. Age of Empires 2 was a different gaming experience than Age of Empires for a number of reasons. Battlezone 2 was very different than the original (which was good or bad depending on your point of view). I would argue that Homeworld: Cataclysm is a different gaming experience than Homeworld.

Another one bites the dust

In the same way that Ensemble Studios refined and improved upon Age of Empires with its sequel, Homeworld: Cataclysm is a much better game than the original. The once awkward and hard to use interface is now a joy to use. Some may not like the unit limit restrictions placed by the support unit requirements. However, this forces players to concentrate on tactics and strategies that make "sense" instead of creating artificial strategies that reflect more on exploiting game play holes rather than creative thinking. The game plays much faster and you can now use time compression to make things faster still. The one complaint that does have some merit is that the campaign games seem to require very repetitive strategies and tactics. You simply react to events that are coming fast and furious at you. These complaints aside, there really isn't too much wrong in Homeworld: Cataclysm. It is a fun and challenging game that I enjoyed playing. I wasn't too big a fan of the original, but the potential that I saw there is finally realized in this sequel. Fans of the original and RTS gamers that want to play a 3D game that highlights the good things about the 3D environment will want to check out Homeworld: Cataclysm.