It’s been almost 25 years since the first Homeworld came out in 1999, 21 years since Homeworld 2 and 9 years since the 2nd was remastered. As a fanatical RTS enjoyer, I was expecting with the long anticipated Homeworld 3 release, the likes of Starcraft, Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Age of Empires or even Halo Wars but with Homeworld 3 I’m not exactly sure what I got except for a game I’d rate as a 5/10. On the surface level, Homeworld 3 is a beautiful game with great music and ambience but below this pretty face are a whole lot of unsatisfying, unimpressive and incomplete elements that make me scratch my head at why it’s even called a RTS and in fact made me want to play other RTS or space games more during my playthrough. Is Homeworld 3 worth the $60 US dollars? In my opinion, no and I highly recommend waiting for a sale if you do want it especially if you are an RTS fan.
First, the settings and especially the accessibility options for Homeworld 3 are pretty straightforward, the game does offer Legacy or Modern mode for RTS controls for players who are familiar or unfamiliar with Homeworld 3 or just the real time strategy genre in general. There’s nothing too unique or noteworthy about some of the general settings offered in comparison to games like Hi-Fi Rush or even Total War: Pharaoh but the issues lie more in the gameplay itself. Regardless it’s nice that they offer a tutorial albeit a needlessly slow tutorial to get you acquainted with the UI, UX and the simple mechanics of the game.
The User Interface is also straightforward; if you’ve played any other RTS game, you’re not left with questions, there’s no complicated system or unlabeled tab you wonder about. Thus the User Experience is also pretty simple although unit selection or micro groupings due to how simple it is can get pretty frustrating depending on the maps when you have a sizeable force to control.
Since I keep bringing up the actual gameplay, I’m just going to talk about it here pretty early on compared to other reviews I’ve done in the past since the gripes and issues I have with Homeworld 3 lie mainly in the incredibly boring, sometimes tedious and slow gameplay experience. It feels like Homeworld 3 is a very dumbed down, no risk RTS experience for someone who has never played or seen the likes of Star Wars Empire at War, a Total War game or a Command & Conquer. The pacing of resource gathering and actual combat will leave you in tears of boredom particularly during the campaign missions where your gameplay is interrupted every 3 minutes by a cinematic or story development on the map. Starcraft and Warcraft’s campaign missions did a much better job with gameplay interruptions for the story than Homeworld 3 for sure. Resource gathering and how resources are spent in queue feel restrictive and slow paced compared to other RTS games.
Story-wise, Homeworld 3 does offer a recap from the past two games on what’s happening from the main menu so you’re not completely lost lore-wise. But if you’re familiar at all with Warhammer, Halo or Dune in any of their media forms, you’re not completely lost anyway even if you don’t watch the recap. The story feels tremendously generic 90% of the time while it has some interesting concepts that it glosses over the remaining 10% of the time. Just like with other aspects of Homeworld 3, the story is incredibly risk-free, unsatisfying and unimpressive. Perhaps the only good thing I can say about the story is the voice acting and at times I feel a bit sorry for the voice actors as some of their dialogue is so predictable and cheesy.
Back to combat:
Unit selection and targeting can be rather finicky even switching between real-time and map overview perspectives, while there is an option to pause so you can try to select or target units Homeworld 3 seems to rely heavily on pausing as a feature more so than an option. Unit movements or fleet movements are quite inconsistent and at times non-existent depending on the ships’ elevation levels or movement speeds. It’s quite frustrating as well that the pathing of individual units like the Resource Gatherers despite using Passive stances is quite wonky in this supposed 4D RTS to the point where they will just stumble into hostile forces anyway. At some points it feels like you’re playing a game only based on the last battle of Ender’s Game rather than pulling off anything meaningful.
Things get even more unimpressive during combat as you realize you’re just watching things happen rather than making things happen, one would think based on even the lacking RTS element of Stellaris and other mechanics seen in space-related RTS’s in recent memory, Homeworld 3 could have taken a bigger inspiration but it instead compresses the advertised 4D environment into a flat 2D one where advanced positioning in space, fleet formations and set stances simply don’t matter even on the highest difficulty due to the lack of other mechanics that may have made the RTS aspect more interesting. Even the maps and environments, while beautiful, also feel limited in terms of navigational terrain and size.
Homeworld 3 does have awesome concepts such as the aforementioned 4 dimensional aspect of map movement and certain unit abilities but at the end of the day due to the awful combat balancing and mechanics, Homeworld 3 literally just comes down to a numbers game of gathering enough resources to spam unit construction rather than some sort of strategic or tactical play you pull off at certain points in time with what is available to you.
I suspect one of the bigger issues with Homeworld 3 is that apart from looking gorgeous, it just has no niche or gameplay that sets it apart as a really great RTS or even a unique one that offers satisfying reward for potential gameplay. Overall it feels bland and unrewarding to play, it doesn’t challenge me mentally compared to other RTS games I’ve played in the past. While the War Games roguelike mode is much more enjoyable, you’d be hard pressed to find many other players lobbying up for random groups depending on the time of day and playing it solo is incredibly boring.
And I do not think that the game is worth $60 as it is with the little content it actually offers beyond the campaign and the War Games so asking your friends to buy it just to play a game mode you will collectively put down after a few nights of playing is a no-go when you can have more of a blast paying less for Helldivers II or something.
In the end, I’d rather play Rising Lands, an objectively more painful RTS experience because of these issues that plague Homeworld 3 as the issues I have with it makes me want to play other RTS games rather than continuing to invest into Homeworld 3 as it is right now.
I do hope the developers continue working on Homeworld 3 because I do think it does have potential for being a seriously engaging RTS and I can tell that parts of the game had a lot of love put into it especially the visuals and environment but as it is right now I cannot recommend it to any RTS lover at its current price.