Homeworld 2

Nearly 5 years since release, I take some time to reflect on still one of the few games I finished in a single 16-20 hour sitting. I can't help but say that I'm still awestruck at how fun this game was. I never really had the opportunity to play the original Homeworld game or its Cataclysm expansion, so this review should serve as a little insight to newcomers of the series. I was hugely impressed with the level of detail.  Relic's talent that would later show in groundbreaking games like Company of Heroes is easily recognized in Homeworld 2, one of their first offerings.

I could almost compare the game, in terms, to a tournament fighting game: you could portentially sit down and play a quick "match", not really worrying too much about "what buttons to push" (the tactical planning involved) and still do well and have a load of fun, or you could sit and analyze the most effective combination of attack and be well rewarded for your efforts: the choice is yours.

This game will reward you well for planning and taking a more thoughtful approach to the situation rather than just pumping out as many units as you can and throwing them all at the enemy...

Overall, the story in the campaign mode offers a gripping, addictive experience. This gam engrossed me to the fullest extent of my attention span and kept me too intrigued to let it rest.  That's probably the only sour point I could make about the game, is that it's too short. It's difficult to penalize it for this since the entirety of the campaign was so satisfying. There are 15 highly detailed missions, some of which will require a few tries to get through, each of which have some extensive cinematics throughout.

All-in-all, if you've never played the Homeworld series of games before, and enjoy tactical RTS games, you should definitely find this game. One thing can't hurt though: download the demo and check it out for yourself; if it even remotely interests you, then you've only just begun to reward yourself.

At the time of review, I ran the game on a P4 2.8GHz, nVidia GeForce 4 Ti4600 (120MB), with 800MHz frontside bus and 512MB of 232-pin 1066MHz RAMBUS. This game ran almost perfectly smooth for me throughout (even when running some apps in the background).