![]() ![]() The miners of Clan Somtaaw, however, are relatively lowly and unimportant, lacking both resources and influence. Some of these clans are large and wealthy, with large fleets of warships entrusted with keeping the peace around the homeworld. ![]() In the years immediately following they have reverted back to their old clan-based culture and are busy establishing themselves on Higaara and rebuilding their society. First up, the story: in HW the Higaaran exiles reclaimed their homeworld from the Taidann empire, after a long and bitter struggle. So with that established, this relatively brief review can establish what’s changed from HW and whether that’s for the better or not. If and when I ever review HW2 I might reassess this from scratch, but for now just take my word for it: the core HW gameplay was great, still is, and few RTS games have come close to matching it. In short, there’s the spectacular Babylon-5 style show of starships hammering at each other, but also great tactical play. It’s frantic and chaotic at times, but never cumbersome or confusing. The ships have a full range of motion in three dimensions, and yet the controls are remarkably easy to get to grips with. Suffice to say that a typical battle is pretty amazing to both see and command: a swarm of bombers drive and strafe across an enemy carrier, whilst lumbering destroyers close in with heavy cannon firing and interceptors distract the escorts, is pretty awesome. Given the similarities of Cataclysm to its illustrious predecessor, I’m not going to ramble on at length about what makes HW gameplay great. It’s the kind of material you might expect to see in an “expansion pack” for a game, but unlike an expansion does not require you to own a copy of the original. What is new is the selection of ships and the story. It’s powered by exactly the same engine, uses a very similar interface, and the mechanics of play are pretty much the same. Instead, it was billed as a “standalone episode”. Cataclysm – produced under license by Barking Dog studios – was you see never put forward as a sequel. However, that’s not what I’m here to talk to you about. Unsurprisingly HW was a big hit, so you’d probably expect a sequel to have emerged sooner or later. To cap it all off, there was poignant and moving story about a race of Exiles making their way home across as a hostile galaxy. It also featured a fluid, intuitive control system, and stripped back the usual base-building mechanics of RTS gameplay, so as to concentrate on the tactics and combat. Set in the depths of space it gave you an armada of fighters, destroyers and carriers to control, all in glorious, spinny-rotating-o-vision 3D. HW wasn’t just a game, you see it was a thing of beauty. Your mining ship at the start of the game.īack in 1999, the release of Relic’s Homeworld was a pretty significant event for real-time strategy. ![]()
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