In addition to new ships and technology, the concept of supply has been added to the game. This puts a clear limit to the amount of ships you can have in your fleet, unlike in Homeworld where the unit limit was ambiguous and artificial. Now, different ships take up different supply units; for instance, a dreadnought takes up 80 supply, while a recon ship takes up just two supply. Like in Blizzard's Starcraft, this means you can't just crank out a swarm of superships, because you'll need to balance your fleet's makeup with due consideration for your supply limit, which can be increased by building support modules and carriers.

Your Somtaaw command ship also operates a little differently from the Homeworld mothership. For one thing, it can actually move, and you'll find that in many missions, you will want to navigate your ship through the map to get to victory objectives faster. Also, the command ship is now modular, meaning you can build different supplemental modules to make the ship more useful and powerful. You can build supply modules to support larger fleets, an engineering module to research engine and drive technologies, a weapons module for advanced weaponry, and so on. The modularity of your command ship means that technology research is now divided into a five-branch tree, which along with the many new special ability technologies, different ships, and upgrades means Cataclysm is a much more strategic game than Homeworld, which had a fairly linear tech tree. In Cataclysm there are a lot more choices, meaning there are a lot more options for how to play.

The graphics in Cataclysm are gorgeous, especially at very high resolutions. There is now a new pilot view that lets you see through a first-person view from any of your ships, and in this mode, dogfights look spectacular, as laser blasts and explosions light up the screen while fighters and capital ships fill your view. The Somtaaw ship designs are good, though perhaps not quite as distinctive as the original Kushan and Taidan fleets. Unfortunately, the Beast ships don't look very interesting; they're mostly just the old recycled ships with red textures. Cataclysm's sound effects, which were a strong point in Homeworld, also aren't quite as good as in the original, although they are still commendable by any other standards. While every unit now has its own voice and lines of speech, the voice acting is inconsistent throughout the game. The atmospheric music in Cataclysm is subtler than in Homeworld, but still good.

The multiplayer options in Cataclysm aren't that much different from Homeworld's, although now you play as the Somtaaw or the Beast instead of the Kushan or Taidan. It's just as well, since the Beast and Somtaaw clearly outmatch the original Homeworld factions. The game's many new strategic options, and the Beast assimilation ability, should make for more exciting multiplayer matches than in Homeworld, where the two playable sides were very similar.

Cataclysm also features a few less glamorous enhancements that are nonetheless significant, such as the improved interface. You can issue waypoint movement orders now, and you can also access unit information via the tab button, which brings up an information box that displays a unit's hit points, armor, weapon damage, and special abilities. You can also focus on an enemy unit and see its health bar. While Homeworld was deliberately cryptic in the amount of information it displayed, Cataclysm presents all the statistics that strategy players would want. What's even more welcome is the addition of the ability to issue attack, guard, and other commands from the sensors manager, which lets you manage and command your fleet from a strategic overview. These enhancements make controlling and inspecting your fleets a lot easier. Cataclysm also has a time-compression feature, which alleviates some of the excruciatingly slow pace of the original Homeworld by letting you speed up time during lulls in the action or at the end of a mission when all you want to do is just mop up the resources.

Homeworld: Cataclysm adds a lot of depth and strategy to the original game, in addition to an original story and two new fleets, but it preserves the essential gameplay. The missions are well designed, although their solutions are often a bit too puzzle-like, but in general the game plays well and stays interesting. The new faction is well designed, and it has a lot of interesting new ships and abilities, while the revamped interface really does improve the gameplay. Where Cataclysm fails to live up to its predecessor is in production values; the music and sound aren't quite as good as Homeworld's, and the epic scope of Homeworld is also missing. However, although the cinematic quality of the game is a notch below Homeworld, the game itself is more solid. Therefore, fans of Homeworld should certainly try Cataclysm, since it provides all-new experiences and noticeable gameplay improvements. And if you haven't played Homeworld, then Cataclysm is still a good way to introduce yourself to the series, as long as you don't mind a challenge.
 

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By Elliott Chin, GameSpot PC  [UPDATED: 09/15/00]

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