Homeworld is back: that’s Homeworld 3 in a nutshell. It’s the real-time strategy series you remember and, probably, what you want it to be now. And actually, to hear Rob Cunningham tell it in our interview below – he who helped dream up Homeworld and co-founded Relic, and now leads Blackbird, the studio making Homeworld 3 – this game is actually what they always wanted Homeworld 2 to be. Computers just couldn’t handle it at the time.
But now they can. They can handle this big idea of using space wreckage as cover to hide behind, fly through, sneak around – use it like a theatrical set you can play tricks on your opponents with. I’m over here – no not really, I’m over here! And I’ve played Homeworld 3 for about an hour and the idea really works. More importantly, it’s simple to use. No fussy controls govern it; your cursor shows how ships will interact with a piece of scenery and then they do. They will make trench-runs on their own with only a simple instruction – trench-runs! They’ll fly through huge engine shafts of colossal wrecks on their own – peekaboo! They’ll even use nearby cover automatically while preparing for another attack run. They are not dumb: they won’t fly into walls and scenery if you leave them unattended. And it’s fun.
And those two words “it’s fun” are crucial to what Homeworld 3 is about. It’s as though the faff of the old games has been tidied away – but not sacrificed – to enable the exciting parts of the formula to come through. And what really comes through for me is space.
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