This was another one that was available for demo during Next Fest. They not only had a tutorial ready to test out but a war games mode as well. While I was looking more for a sci-fi game that was not co-op I was able to set up my game to test out the war games feature for solo play.
The first thing that caught my eye was just how ugly this game was. I had everything on near max or max settings. It was chewing almost 14 gigs of Vram. This was all it could give me? Yikes.
I should also mention this game has Denuvo anti-cheat. I know a lot of gamers out there won’t go near games that have this as a requirement. I’m not happy about it either but I was willing to still check out the game.
They are also already selling a season pass for this game. I guess one should be happy they are only asking for a base price of $59.99 instead of $69.99 like a lot of games out there. The feeling I got from this game during the demo was a $9.99-$19.99 game. Nowhere near what they are asking for let alone season passes and they are trying to charge $89.96 on a bundle for skins, soundtracks, and other stuff.
The tutorial was a lot more solid than the game itself. It took me almost two minutes just to get through the section about using the camera. I’m going to say it now this game needs to go back to the drawing board about a lot of things and make them far simpler. I don’t need a bazillion buttons to press to move around the game’s camera. Which sucked anyways.
The camera should not be something a player has to constantly think about and keep readjusting every few seconds. Yet I always seemed to need to zoom in, zoom out, rotate, focus on a troop, focus on another troop, and so on.
Their “modern” camera viewing was a disaster. I should have been focusing on my brain-dead units that would just stand there next to my carrier not healing or standing in combat getting killed doing nothing.
Don’t even get me started when I order my fleet in, and they are flying to go to combat with something halfway across the screen. While also taking on heavy damage getting taken out. It seems the AI is quite brain-dead with aggression mode enabled.
The main point of it was the mothership and a carrier could produce units. You have a harvesting unit that collects resources. You can also research the ships that are producing units.
It was at least nice I could move around the slow-moving mother ship or carrier and get new units being produced to be closer to the action. It’s just a shame each unit I had to toggle on aggression and order into the battlefield as they were coming out.
The game at least has a button to press to target all combat units. That is till you have a certain amount of them. Then they seemed to get broken into different groups. I was, however, constantly having to toggle on aggression and fleet formation.
You would think if a ship was ordered to join a fleet. It would auto inherent in any setting that the fleet already had. I guess that is just another thing you must micromanage in this game among many other things going on.
At least during the demo and war games when my resource collection unit got killed, that was the end of being able to gather resources. I’m not sure if I missed the option to produce more somewhere or if you just can’t.
If this is how the game ends up rolling out when you have real PvP enabled. I can just see everyone suiciding in your first combat units to take out the other players harvesting ship and then it’s gg.
Once I was done with the tutorial it was nice, I could set up my own solo game to test out the war games. It looks like at some point they will have other difficulty modifiers and map levels. At least for the demo, it was standard and war games.
I would say this was somewhat interesting. I was fully expecting the playfield to be rather large. Instead, it was just a tiny area you could move around in. You have a set objective to complete. Once you finish them you can wrap to the next map where you can continue with what ships and progress you had before then.
For the first map, I just had to secure some points. There would be incursion points where enemy NPCs would show up that I would need to take out.
When you complete objectives you tend to find an artifact. These artifacts change the gameplay a little bit. They all seem to have some heavy drawbacks from selecting any one of them. Making me kind of unsure if it was worth giving up for the gain they were offering for the selected unit in question.
Like doing more damage at the expense of receiving more damage for recon ships. Recon ships already pop if the wind is blowing the wrong way. The only real net positive I even wanted this for was the increased vision since they are recon.
Then I was sent off to the next war game. Where I had to secure resources. This was yet another easy one that I mostly used to try and max out some of the ships I could bring out onto the field.
The biggest downside to once you finish all objectives and can move on. There will still be enemies spawning. So, it’s not like you can stand there and finish mining everything and fully prepping for the next area. A constant threat and ships are getting damaged or taken out.
The next war game after this with the fleet I had built up seemed to ramp up in difficulty a bit. I had also lost my resources gathering ship which put me at quite a huge disentangle. That is what I get for not leaving a couple of units behind to defend it.
Granted when you pressed to select all combat units it would have moved those away as well. Since I have not gotten to the point in this game of having enough micromanagement of setting up different groups and ordering things around that way. Instead of just having everything selected and sending it all in. At least in the future, I can see the grouping feature to be quite useful.
In the third war game, I had to capture different points from the enemies. These points were a lot further apart than in the other war games and I left behind my slower ships. Those slower ships ended up getting picked off since I could not get my fleet back in time to defend them.
While I did manage to secure one of the points. I had to go back more than once to recapture the same point. I guess this is where having other players with you could have come in rather handy.
Once my carrier was defeated it was game over for me. I then got some stats about the war games I was in. I have no idea how many war games you keep going on for. For my first attempt, I felt I did a decent enough job to be solo.
I also got some experience and leveled up from playing in the games. Which included some upgrades and some other perks for doing so.
Final thoughts
From what I have seen in the demo I just don’t see the value for the price being asked on this one. Even more so since they are already pushing for season passes, DLCs, and skin sales. It was an interesting game to play, however, it is not something I'd expect to be coming out in 2024. It played and looked more like a game during certain aspects to a game from the 2000s if I'm being nice.
I am also someone who has never played any of the Homeworld games as far as I can recall. So, I have no idea if this game lives up to what players are expecting from this series. I however got a feeling it's falling quite short for how long people have been waiting for it.
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Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Homeworld 3.
Disclosure: This is based on the demo that was available during the February Next Fest event in 2024.
