Homeworld (Remastered)

Zach Goodier

As a newcomer to the franchise, I had no idea what to expect from this game, and I found myself pleasantly surprised with what I found. You play the commander of a mothership. During your test runs, circumstances arise that leave you as the last hope for your civilization. Desperate, you decide to return to your races ancient home: Hiigara. However, pirates, unexplored space, and a formidable empire stand between you and your home. As you engage in the 16 mission story, you will be tested in a variety of ways that challenge your ability to adapt your fleet as new threats arise.

Even the backgrounds look amazing, and they only get better in later levels.

The story isn’t overly engaging, it simply helps you understand what is going on, and setting up each level. Your ship has an AI and support crew that help with things like research and fleet management, but these characters are simply voices, nothing more. Where this game aims is to deliver strong gameplay, and this it does exceptionally well. Animation and models are all beautifully rendered, with your ships having their own look and feel. Enemy ships are distinctly different, based on who you’re up against, and they all offer unique challenges.

Your mothership is your home, and carries the survivors of your race in stasis. It also produces all your other ships.

One of the major things this game does is carry your fleet over between levels. This means that whatever ships you have remaining following your completed mission, will be the ships you start out with next level. This results in a mechanic that makes you seriously consider what ships your fleet is fielding, and whether your fleet can react to new threats well, or if you are overspecializing in an area. Either method can work, and each carries its own challenges. If your fleet is generalized, then you will have to likely move more slowly to identify threats and position/build yourself accordingly. Specialization results in a fleet that might be exceptional at handling certain types of threats, but obviously would be lacking in every other area.

Outside of the actual game, story is conveyed with various stills and narration.

Ship models are all appealing, and the relationships between ships in combat are interesting, with battles feeling truly life-like, as ships rip into each other. While certain ships specialize against certain enemies, they never feel like single-purpose tools, like they can in other games. Even if a ship specializes in as an anti-fighter corvette, it can still be useful against other corvettes and smaller ships, because lighter armor on most corvettes offers less protection. This keeps things feeling realistic, rather than having to build a particular type of ship to overcome each enemy ship. This is why the game’s flexibility leaves you options in how you want to approach most situations. However, it does challenge you by making certain methods ineffective, so it is still up to the player to adapt.

Good:

-Wonderful models and animation.

-Has that “rock/paper/scissors” dynamic, but doesn’t make it so extreme to make ships broken.

-Having your fleet carry over to the next level adds a new dynamic to how you play.

Bad:

-Story and characters are lacking, but this is an RTS above all else.

Scully Rating: 9 out of 10.

Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion

Zach Goodier

While I have played the original Sins, I basically refer to this as the true game.  This game is about galactic domination, and lets  you manage an empire in real time as you expand, explore, and conduct diplomacy, and eventually go to war in order to achieve victory.  You can choose between 3 races, and those 3 races each have 2 factions: loyalist and rebels.  While there is a back-story to these races and factions, you can ignore it, since you can assign teams to any faction.

Establish an empire that would make the Empire from Star Wars look like an Amish enclave.

You start out with one planet, then proceed to move out and explore, as you research military and civil technology to improve your empire.  These can range from improving weapon damage or armor for you ships, to improving tax income on your planets.  These can all help in various ways, but each faction is unique; some are more commerce oriented, while others focus mostly on combat, but all are able to branch out in some way so they don’t feel limited. 

The galaxy can be a beautiful, but dangerous place.

You can select pre-made maps, or do random maps of various sizes.  As you explore these maps, you’ll find various planets, like volcanic, frozen, desert, and terran.  There are also dwarf planets and asteroids.  There are also wormholes, pirates, and other wonders mixed in. Each one is different, with planets being able to accommodate a higher population in general, but different types are ideal for different developments, whether they focus on cultural or industrial output.  Each has its own value, with culture helping to convert planets, and industry helping to improve your military and commercial fleets.  However, overspecializing in one area leaves you vulnerable in the other, so balance is always key in developing a good strategy. 

Here's an overview of this map, but you can SEAMLESSLY scroll in on any system to see what's there, as long as you have some way of monitoring it, that is.

Capital ships are harder to build, and their numbers or severely limited, but they offer unique abilities as they level up from experience that make them indispensible in your armada.  You’ll want to protect them, because if you lose them, that means having to rebuild the ship and starting over from scratch, so it’s a good idea to keep an eye on your fleets when they’re engaged to withdraw any capital ships that might be at risk.  However, they aren’t fragile by any means, but if your enemy is well-equipped, then it can give you cause for concern.

The reason this is the version to play is that it comes with the star bases and the rebel factions, which the main game doesn’t have.  Star bases allow for you to establish an orbital platform that you can customize with various improvements ranging from establishing a proxy government to maintain control of a planet even if the enemy takes the ground, to construction bays for ships and trade ships. 

The ultimate ships that each faction controls are the Titans, and they require an enormous amount of resources and time to construct.  While this seems daunting, the rewards are as big as the ship itself.   Each faction has a unique titan, which generally specializes in offense or defense.  Simply put, each ship is a flying super fortress, capable of packing an entire fleet’s worth of firepower and armor into a single ship.  That being said, you’ll want to defend your titan, and sending it out alone is never a great idea, since you’ll want support ships to keep it from being the sole target of your enemies, because it’s not invincible.

This titan is literally a giant gun with smaller guns and missile batteries built around it... and an engine to make it move.

The graphics are amazing, you can seamlessly zoom in and out of the action to quickly transition from one system to another.   This game has an impressive sense of scale, and it can seem overwhelming at first to manage an empire in real time when you truly feel that you have to eventually run half a solar system down to the mining and trade.  While a lot of it is automated, it can seem a little daunting to have to manage it all when the situation changes, and something almost always slips through the cracks.

Titans are tough, but situations like this are bad.  Every ship is firing at the titan, and while it can take a beating, a combined assault like this will wear it down.

The problems with this game are few, but significant.  Diplomacy is cool, but unless you’re actually on the same team, you HAVE to fight eventually, so if you’re hoping for a Civilization-style diplomacy victory, guess again.  Plus the way you earn favor with each group is generally to perform some silly mission they give, whether you have to attack someone or just give them things.  While this alone isn’t a bad thing, when it requires attacking an ally, or someone that is one the other side of the galaxy, well out of reach, then it really becomes a hassle.  And the worst part is, if you don’t finish the mission, the provider becomes dissatisfied with you, making diplomacy a real pain at times, and it can seem rather simplistic and one-sided. 

Go forth, and do great things, my friends.

Overall, this is a fun game, while it isn’t without fault, and the play times can drag on for ages (so be prepared), it is still a fun game.  Diplomacy feels weak, but as a military space RTS, this is probably as good as it gets.  Empire building is always fun for me, but without the ability to see more diverse AI in the single-player, and the difficulty of forming alliances, and knowing they will only be temporary, leaves the diplomacy in general as feeling like more of an afterthought than a significant component of the game itself.  While it helps keep monkeys off your back, it doesn’t add a whole lot to the game as a whole.  That being said, I never cared much for diplomacy when I have a massive space armada under my command, anyways.

Good:

-Excellent Empire building, space RTS

-Sense of scale is impressive throughout, with varied planet types and new horizons to explore (until you find everything, that is).

-Sophisticated research trees and diversity between races and factions

-TITANS!!! They make the bad ships go away in style.

Bad:

-Diplomacy is a weak, which hurts the overall feel more than it should.

-Enemy AI isn’t poor, it does feel a little straightforward though.

Scully Rating: 9 out of 10