This is by far the weakest in the series (including DoK) when it comes to storytelling. Everything here just feels like a massive step back, from the focus on unlikable characters to the terrible cutscenes and the very short length of the campaign.

The more you play this game, the more you're really going to notice that this may also be the weakest in the series when it comes to gameplay. First and foremost, you'll find that your units control as if they are "drunk", often failing to follow your commands, having severe pathing issues whenever they are near any sort of terrain and even failing to hold position when all you want to do is have some missile frigates sit there and snipe. There is also remarkably little room for actually using strategies in this real time strategy game, as fights very often just boil down to who has the biggest ball of units. This is compounded by the fact that what few maps the game actually includes, are all terrain heavy, very claustrophobic and very tiny. If you were expecting some HW1 or 2 style open space maps, you won't find them here.

As mentioned earlier, the campaign is very short, has poor storytelling and offers 0 replay value.

As for the multiplayer modes you have Skirmish and Wargames. Skirmish is exactly what you think it is, however there are only 5 maps, half of which start you within spitting distance of the enemy. With resource nodes literally everywhere on the map there is very little, if any tactics going on in these extremely short matches to see who can build up a big enough ball of units first. This is an incredibly massive step in the wrong direction when compared to HW1 or 2, where you had large, open maps that required scouting and limited resource nodes that created interesting tactical opportunities.

Wargames is the third and final mode, and honestly props the entire game up. It is essentially a 1 to 3 player roguelite, where you control a small carrier and small number of specialized units in a sequence of 3 random maps, with random objectives as well as optional difficulty modifiers. Along the way you collect "artifacts", which augment your units with powerful modifiers that can make your break your run.

From the environments to the ship designs and particle effects this game really does look incredible. However it really does need to be noted that as of the time of writing, the game is plagued with horrible performance issues with even 4090 users reporting the same lows of 19-20 FPS during the benchmark as the more mid and low end users. This is almost definitely something on the game's end and will likely be patched in the near future. But what really is the point of nice graphics if the game's framerates are unstable?

At the end of the day, graphics alone does not make a great game. For me, personally, I place much more value in the quality and quantity of the content as well as the overall stability of the game. If units are constantly ignoring commands in an RTS, it's a huge problem. If map design is bad (from a gameplay perspective), or if content is lacking or of low quality, then it's a problem. If the game lacks any sort of staying power or replay value, then it's a problem. Some of these things may be fixed in future updates, but I'm rating the game for what it is right now, not months/years from now.

comically bad story, very few campaign missions (12) or War Game maps (6), lot of IA problems, lack of ship variety and depth, little to no strategy (blob vs blob)

TL;DR :: They took everything good about Homeworld and disregarded it... then some idiot MD or creative director thought it would be a good idea to replicate Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak in space. This game is total trash, no customization, no modules and little to no tech research branches. It's sad to say that in this current market a indie developer is doing much better than this dumpster fire of a game. Congrats Blackbird you managed to destroy a legend of a game... and now the gamer community can concentrate on waiting for what will surely be better than this sad excuse for a space RTS.

Don't buy this; just continue waiting to Falling Frontier.