Recent reviews by Lupercal

For the love of Monad, if Owlcat makes another pathfinder campaign please keep the real time with pause combat.
Please don't remove it like in Rogue Trader.
You are our only hope.

For the love of Monad, if Owlcat makes another pathfinder campaign please keep the real time with pause combat.
Please don't remove it like in Rogue Trader.
You are our only hope.

This carrier is bugged at the moment. As soon as resource collectors dock to the carrier while retrieving salvage, they are permanently despawned, thus bricking the resource collector. The only way to fix them is to scuttle and produce another one.

In addition there is lack of clarity in the compendium where this fleet isn't listed and the original one this one replaces (the reconnaissance fleet) does not list this skin as an option. This is only mentioned in the fleet selection screen "A refurbished carrier is the flagship of this Reconnaissance fleet, allowing for on-the-fly deployment in a variety of situations."

In addition the support frigate clips with the carrier model upon being built.

Not worth at full price, I'm not sure that even 50% discount would make this worthwhile. Just get Homeworld Remastered and Homeworld Emergence instead.
The game doesn't seem to do anything better than the previous games (excluding graphics). The gameplay is gutted. The game removes several important gameplay features present in previous games and doesn't execute the remaining ones as well as the previous games did. The only new addition is terrain in space which, in my opinion, is more of a detriment. It is by far the weakest game in the franchise (excluding mobile and VR games, never played them) in all respects save for obviously graphics.

The game looks excellent, if you have the hardware for it. The models are nice, the effects are great (in particular large ship explosions and their wrecks). The ships and sound effects sound great. There is a lot of banter between units (almost too much sometimes and you can't isolate anything useful out of it), I only wish it was more relevant to what is happening from gameplay perspective (e.g. "we're under fire from enemy corvette/frigate/destroyer etc.).
Except prerendered cutscenes, they just look bad. The best way to describe the cutscenes is outdated and out of place. Previous games had 2D art with some small amount of animation and they looked and set the tone brilliantly. Not sure why BBI decided to (presumably) spend more money on something that looks and works worse than the (presumably) cheaper and easier solution. That's just the visual part of the cutscenes, their content is actualy far, far worse.
One thing that surprises me, is that even though the music is composed by Paul Ruskay (who also made the OSTs for previous games) there are no standout music tracks. The biggest difference to me was a lot more drums with lot of bass, but they are mostly background ambience with no noticeable melody to them. The only memorable tracks were those few that borrowed/replayed themes from the previous games. We also get one more iteration of Adagio for strings.

You can't really specialize and the best strategy is just to get as many resource collectors as possible, spam all available units which you research almost immediately. Then, gather them up and toss them at the enemy. Your mothership can be producing multiple craft simultaneously. Not spamming all ships leaves you at a disadvantage.
The strikecraft have 0 dogfighting behaviour. They stick to one formation like a school of fish fighting other school of fish and never break formation to engage multiple targets. No evasive manoeuvres, no jinking, It really looks terrible compared to previous games, in particular to Homeworld 1. Gone are the stances that changed how units behave in dogfight (evasive, neutral, aggressive). The stances available just decide the distance at which they will try to find targets to shoot at.
Collisions/ramming as a mechanic is absent, so is fuel. Tactics are of no impact, spamming and force concentration are king.

The unit AI seems unfinished at best and downright broken at worst. They often refuse to fire on hostiles within weapon range until you give them a direct attack order. This is a frequent occurrence, units are within firing range and their set stance should have them fire on the enemy, but they just ignore each other. The AI and pathfinding become another issue due to a new feature introduced in this game, namely terrain. Much too often they go where you don't them to go. They also refuse to sit still and fire their weapons on a target within range, they constantly wander off. This makes frigates and capital ships incredibly frustrating and underwhelming to use.

Terrain in space. Its impressive the developer took the risk, but at its current execution it only detracts from the gameplay. First of all, the terrain (megastructures, space rocks) are way too large and the maps are way too small, heavily restricting the space in which you play. I don't think there is a single map that would just be the void of space with some small rocks to harvest for resources, like it was in the previous games. It feels like you're diving in underground caves and not flying in space.
Second of all, the AI sometimes has weird interactions with it. It is competent enough to not cause traffic jams when you order a lot of ships to move in tight spaces, however if you order a lot of ships to move behind a rock, some will end up on the side you don't want them to be. Also using terrain isn't really necessary and doesn't give any significant advantage.

I don't think it really adds anything interesting to the game at this point. The vision, weapon ranges and ship speed aren't balanced to work well with this terrain. What does it matter that an enemy is behind a wreck of some megaship if I wouldn't be able to see nor fire on them anyway, had there been no wreck in the way?

With the presence of directional damage (ships take more damage from behind etc.) we should have more controls over the pitch, yaw, roll and direction of our ships. Yet all we have is a simple move and attack order with no fine control which direction the ship is facing. This also isn't necessary. TTK is extremely low.

All subsystems were removed from the game. This is just a straight downgrade for no dis reason. Same goes for utility modules, such as cloaking, hyperspace, hyperspace inhibitors, research modules, attack/defense modules.

Hyperspace as an ability/movement option is completely gone. There are no buildable hyperspace gates. It is present in story and cutscenes, but is removed entirely from gameplay. This is a big deal. It might be correlated to the maps being so small, but I'm not sure which came first in that case. I am really baffled by removal of this option as it is such an integral part of the universe and gameplay.

The game feels really dumbed down with all those features absent, like a bad knockoff and not a sequel.

My complaints with the story can be narrowed down to bad presentation and execution, different approach to the way the story is told and awful writing. There is a character limit here so I will post my thoughts elsewhere, but in short:
Hiigarans are utterly incompetent fools who are struggling against a saturday morning cartoon villain. The antagonist has powers that break existing rules of the universe with no explanation. To allow the plot to happen both suffer from sudden onset of amnesia and forget about both existing tech from previous games and the new abilities they are shown to possess in this game. The antagonist apparently just forgets they could kill our fleets in an instance.

The presentation is poor due to the prerendered cutscenes. The models look bad, there is plenty of clipping during closeups (cables and Imogen's hair), Isaac's jersey having some weird artifacts on his back.
Further the facial animations are also, at best, outdated. Up close they just do not look good for prerendered cutscenes. Imogen looks like she is doing her best to hold it in and failing. The lip sync is off, it seems the characters were animated by hand with no mocap (which is impressive), but also makes them extremely emotive, almost like cartoon characters. the Antagonist is the worst offender in this, at one cutscene I thought I was watching a Pixar animation due to how she moved her arms and head.

The ending also felt off, instead of having a conventional victory there is a sacrifice/reconciliation theme going on which I don’t find to have been explained adequately as the only viable/best solution. The focus on personal drama was not done particularly well and doesn’t fit the setting.
The campaign is also very short, but given how terrible the story is that's actually a benefit.

Great game under terrible publisher.
Invasion of player privacy is not making anyone safer - stop lying PSN.

Remove both rage art and heat, game gets instantly better

Less features than KSP1, and that's before mods.

Monetized, non-functioning abandonware. Do not buy.
The game simply doesn't launch on a modern system and there are no official patches/solutions. There are some dervishes and soothsayers on the forums advising to either disconnect your headset or install old codecs to get the game to run but even those measures don't help launching the game.
I tried seeking help via the official rebellion support, which admirably assisted me for a few weeks, but ultimately had no solution for the issue at hand.

Tactical mech squad combat that makes you say keikaku doori at the end of a mission.

I wish all turn based games worked like this.
First you plan what your units will do, once you hit execute (equivalent of end turn in this game) you see how actions of both your units and enemy units will do. Unlike in Frozen Synapse, as a player you are given an accurate prediction of what the enemy will do next turn and you can plan accordingly. Although it seems like an unfair edge, the AI usually has on paper stronger force than you can field.
One half of the game is the tactical combat, the other half is a real time with pause overworld map, superficially similar to what there is in Mount & Blade. There you customize your units and pick your missions.
Perhaps in the sequel the tactical combat half will also be real time with pause.

EVE but singleplayer, first person and with very little grind. However, the AI is derp tier.

A very fun sandbox that makes a few concessions for it to run at all, specifically in regard to AI efficiency in combat and depth of the main gameplay pillars/loops. In return there are several thousand ships and hundreds of stations being simulated at all times in a universe of a few dozen systems to do with as you please. Befriend them, help them, pirate their assets, cripple them by destroying their miners and economy.
Although at its core the gameplay is emergent and dependent on player actions, there are story lines or "plots", which are scripted missions that give the player some goals to achieve. Due to said sandbox nature of the game, some of them can be quite funny, where the player can complete the mission just with the starting fighter sized craft, but instead you can roll up with a fleet of destroyers screened by multiple fighter squadrons.
There truly is not game of this type on the market (singleplayer specifically). The closest competitors could be (but its a massive stretch) space sims like Elite: Dangerous or the venerable Freespace, and in such comparison X games fall short. In here the combat is fine, but again since its a sandbox there won't be big BoE battle scenarios you had in Volition's games and the amount of things you can do with a single ship is not nearly as deep as what Elite offers. However, what neither of these have, is to allow you to fly in your space suit, board a fighter, sit in the fighters chair, shoot enemy fighters fly to a frigate, dock with the frigate, get out of your chair, walk all the way to the elevator next to the fighter dock, ride to the bridge, take control of the frigate, shoot some more NPCs, then dock the frigate with a carrier and then control that carrier by yourself and maybe dock with a station or go ram the AI, while at the same time you control several fleets of other carriers, destroyers, corvettes and fighters and manage multiple stations across a galaxy.
Truly a cerebral experience.