Missions and such

Single Player

The single player campaign can be, at times, totally involved and, at other times, filled with frustration. One interesting tidbit carried over from the original Homeworld is that your ships, your money and your research all remain through the missions. End a mission with four frigates and ten acolytes and the next mission starts with four frigates and ten acolytes. This makes for some very interesting conservation strategies.

Unanimated cutscenes

Gotta love seeing this.

It is worth mentioning that of the seventeen single player missions, I could complete about three the first time through. Of the remaining fourteen missions that needed multiple attempts, I would only saw that four needed extra tries because they were actually difficult. In the remaining ten missions, more than fifty percent of the campaign, the replays came from simply not having enough information in the mission objectives.

Yes, I'm blaming the game for my failures. Without a doubt, the biggest problem comes from a lack of intelligence regarding your missions. It's frustrating when you have to run through a mission once before you understand what is going on.

Gotta love seeing this

That's our baby!

Intelligence? Hah!

Some missions present you with a given objective, say… destroy probes in space. Sounds easy enough. In order to destroy the probes most efficiently, you build tons of fighters with a couple of small capital ships for support. Once you destroy one of the probes, you find yourself facing a tremendous capital ship that just jumped in to stop you from continuing to destroy the probes. In order to counter that capital ship you have to build capitals of your own, which you can't, since you have harvested all the resources and spent it on fighters. Let's just say that your intelligence people aren't nearly as good as the Bothans that helped the rebel alliance take down the Death Star. It's back to the astronomic drawing board.

This mindset of having to play a mission through at least once seems to be becoming a little accepted in the RTS genre. If you don't mind it, the campaign is actually very well done. You have a pretty wide variety of missions; everything from escorting colonists while they are being accosted by Beast infection missiles, to hijacking a ship to make an attack upon a planetary base, to boarding a Beast vessel for information while making a tremendous distraction with a big epic battle.

The reinforcements have arrived.

More options than you can shake a multibeam frigate at.

The campaign is well thought out, and is rarely repetitive. The only remaining complaint about the design of the single player campaign is that sometimes the mission objectives are too creative. Creative objectives are normally a good thing, but when you've got a big lumbering fleet of twenty frigates, two destroyers, two carriers, a dreadnought and your command ship, oftentimes you would simply like to see the objective "Eliminate all enemies" and fight an epic battle that Homer would like to write verse about. A very minor complaint, and the fact that we are whining that the missions are too creative says a lot (about the high quality of the game, and how nitpicky we are nonetheless).