Karma chameleon

Make things difficult

Any and all enjoyment of the challenge of beating Homeworld 2’s campaign goes away the moment a player realizes that this is a game that’s difficult for the sake of being difficult. The mission design isn’t creative or interesting, actually challenging, and the events perpetrated by the level designers certainly don’t make sense. Not counting the final mission (which is predictably bland and illogical in its own way), there are only two kinds of ‘challenge’ in Homeworld 2.

No problems

The tide turns

Up close and personal-like

Most of the time the player will simply spend time fighting off endless waves of enemy craft, as the Mothership is stuck in some location or another for some superficial reason. Occasionally, Relic will mix it up with objective-based missions which happen to send your fleet at various targets, and the enemy will launch a “surprise” attack against the Mothership or whatever you happen to be protecting. Tedium, thy name is Homeworld.

There are other questionable design decisions that harm Homeworld 2. As with the original, the player’s fleet carries over from mission to mission. However, in an attempt to speed the game up, after the last objective is achieved the game will automatically collect all resources and hyperspace out. This would be fine, except that it’s absolutely vital to have as large a fleet as possible at the start of nearly every mission. So you may find yourself barely finishing the final objective in mission 9 and start mission 10 with three ships.

HW2 has a great auto-save system as objectives are passed, but it really helps to save before completing the final objective, so you can build the ‘proper’ fleet to counter what’s coming. For example, I left mission 8 with a large number of torpedo and ion frigates, but mission 9 is nigh-on impossible without a plethora of flak frigates. The solution? Certainly not try and make do with the original fleet, or even scrapping the original one and building flak frigates – that takes too long. Rather, go back to the last mission 8 save, build the correct fleet for mission 9, and then re-start mission 9. This is idiotic, tedious, ludicrously unfair to the gamer and utterly typical of the Relic mission designers.

A Corvette Gunship

Missile barrage

Now ain't that ship a doozy?

Missions are more puzzles than anything with HW2. Few can be done in one try; the most difficult ones can take five or six or more attempts. As the designers pull their oh-so-clever surprises, the player learns to station his forces to counter the surprise. Not only does this destroy immersion in the game by forcing gamers to learn the exact type and location of enemy ships to counter, it breeds an unfortunate cynicism about Homeworld 2 itself.

That’s unfortunate, because underneath the arrogant design, hides a good game.