Product Details
 | Homeworld 2 |
| List Price: | $19.99 |
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Product Description
Homeworld 2 continues the epic struggle of the Hiigarans and their leader Karan S'jet.Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #2204 in Video Games
- Brand: Vivendi Universal
- Model: 020626719803
- Released on: 2003-09-16
- ESRB Rating: Teen
- Platforms: Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me, Windows XP
- Format: CD-ROM
- Dimensions: .90 pounds
Features
- Epic story about the legacyand destiny of the Higarans.
- Totally new 3D engine that renders breathtaking graphics of outer space and ship detail.
- Streamlined interface lets people control the whole game with a few mouse clicks.
- All new fleets, each with unique abilities and craft, for different styles of play.
- Experience outer space complete with asteroids, massive derelicts, gas clouds, and nebulae that stretch for many miles.
Editorial Reviews
From
the Manufacturer
Homeworld 2 continues the epic
struggle of the Hiigarans and their leader Karan S'jet. Many thought
their hardships would end when they returned to Hiigara, yet fate has
not been so kind to the Exiles. Now the Hiigarans face a new and bitter
enemy, a renegade clan from the eastern fringes of the galaxy, who wield
the power of the ancients. Homeworld 2 chronicles the valiant
journey of the Mothership and its crew into the oldest regions of the
galaxy to confront their new foe and discover the truth behind their
exile.
An innovative 3D engine generates cinematic-quality
graphics, stunning special effects, and beautifully rendered ships. The
sublime vistas and otherworldly splendor of Homeworld 2 are in
the award-winning tradition of the original. In-game cinematics flow
seamlessly in and out of gameplay as players command their armada around
eerily beautiful phenomena of deep space, including giant asteroids,
massive derelicts, gas clouds, and nebulae light years across.
A
streamlined interface lets players take total control of their ships and
explore the universe. And all-new camera panning makes maneuvering
fleets in the thick of battle easier than ever. Zoom in to see objects
in intricate detail, zoom out to get a panoramic view, or rotate your
view of deep space a full 360 degrees.
In the dynamic 3D universe
of Homeworld 2 the awe-inspiring phenomena of deep space--giant
asteroids, huge derelicts, murky gas clouds, and vast nebulae--pulse
with the energy that permeates the cosmos. These fully interactive
phenomena--some strategically helpful and others fraught with
danger--add another dimension to gameplay.
Two all-new
customizable battle fleets, each with unique capabilities and
spacecraft, enhance Homeworld 2's strategic complexity and
tactical flexibility. Players can now group ships in strike formations
that move together into combat. New ships such as the flak corvette and
the marine frigate offer innovative tactical choices, while capital
ships have subsystems like engines and weaponry that can be crippled
while leaving the ship ready for capture.
New multiplayer modes
and features allow up to six players to wage war via a LAN or over the
Internet. Additional tools and modules enable the community to develop
new missions and mods.
Customer Reviews
Excellent game, but too hard for most
This game was a must-buy for
me since I also owned the original Homeworld. The story of HW2 is a lot
less compelling than the story of the original Homeworld, but still not
bad. The gameplay is however better.
If you are unfamiliar with
the Homeworld series, it's based on fighting your way through levels,
where you bring your resources and space fleet from the previous mission
(level) to the next. They are all interconnected, and if you do poorly
in one, chances are you'll be at a disadvantage in the next one.
You
command the mighty mothership in your quest to save the galaxy by
retrieving an old hyperspace gate. The mothership is able to build
ships, including carriers that in turn can build most types of ships.
You will be tasked with developing technology, building a viable fleet,
mining for resources, completing mission objectives, and fending off the
enemy - all in a nice concoction of organized chaos. The pace can be
pretty high at times, and although the battlefields are nicely laid out
and the navigation relatively simple, it's still a mess to get through
some of the missions. Chances are you'll play each mission somewhere
between 2 and 20 times before you succeed.
PROS:
* Excellent
concept and gameplay
* Beautiful graphics and sound
* Hours and
hours of fun and challenging gameplay
* Multiplayer option, and
option to play against the computer
* Large fleet of different ships -
friends, allies and foes
* A lot of improvement to make to your
fleet through research
* Nice storyline to follow
CONS:
*
Extremely hard - only one difficulty level. It's a good idea to either
read online strategy guides and walkthroughs, or simply buy the official
strategy guide.
* Hours and hours of challenging gameplay - It can
get a bit tedious and frustrating to play the same mission over and over
again.
* Not a game for relaxing in front of the computer.
I
highly recommend this game, and it's sure to give you days and days,
probably weeks and weeks of active gameplay. I was considered giving
this game a 5, but since there's quite a bit of room for improvement,
and the difficulty level is a bit on the high side, I give it a still
very enjoyable 4 STARS!!!
Better
graphics, worse gameplay
After having finished HW1, I
was more than eager to start HW2. At first I was stunned to find
smoother textures, better graphics, and a better designed interface
(yeah, I think it improved).
However, the gameplay itself changed,
and that much to the worse.
In HW1 you could load a carrier with
fighters - traverse the galaxy and have escort fighters protect against
pockets of enemy aircraft - finally unload the carrier before the target
destination to strike with bitter force (or fail). In HW1 you could
also send out fighters for reconnaissance missions, and still hope for
their return.
In HW2 this no longer is possible. With continous
raides on your ships, and no time to think about "strategy" you get
pounded on every damn free moment - ultimatley leading to only one form
of strategy: PAUSE-command defence-UNPAUSE-see action-PAUSE-command
repair, etc. No more surprise attacks on your side, the AI knows you're
there (which makes sometimes no sense - like in mission 4). Gone are the
times where you sent fighters out to explore, they'll most likely not
return if you decide too. You're pretty much lucky if you only have one
fighter group, and one corvette group attack your ships at any given
time (yeah, this pattern never stops). Repetative? You bet!
And
thats where I believe a game should be entertaining, not frustrating. It
really frustrates, since they improved virtually everything else, but
changed the gameplay for the worse. If you purchase this game in the
belief its a good strategy game, reconsider. If you're more action
oriented, with little strategy in mind, maybe this game is right for
you.
I hope that someone from Relic/Sierra reads the comments
posted around the web, a patch is greatly appreciated that stops this
redundant game play (less attacks?). And no, I don't agree with the
theory that the joy of completing this game is satisfaction. Like you
torture yourself through the levels only to see the fireworks in the
end? Shouldn't it be enjoyable throughout?
After HW1, this comes
as a very big dissapointment. I'll stop playing, and am waiting for a
patch. If no patch comes, I'll post it on Amazon's Marketplace for sale.
Missing that warm-fuzzy feeling
(This is for Homeworld 2
version 1.1... That's including the most recent patch.)
First,
let me say that I've played and completed both Homeworld and Homeworld:
Cataclysm, and I found the first extremely enjoyable and engrossing
(though somewhat frustrating), and the second just mostly frustrating.
This
game was somewhere inbetween.
I agree with reviewers that said
that the storyline of this game was weak. It doesn't make much of sense,
and it leads to many missions that are almost carbon copies of the
original Homeworld (especially the first few missions!) I'm not sure it
fits into the series storyline, either.
Also, the game felt
extremely rushed. There's barely time to breathe between the objectives
that the game gives you. You can't neglect the objectives, either,
because if you do, you might find yourself on the wrong side of
overwhemling force. After the last objective has been achieved, you
automatically collect all remaining resources and hyperspace jump
whether you want to or not, and you're on to the next mission. I know
why the devs did this, because players in the original Homeworld (and I
think Cataclysm as well) would spend hours collecting resources after
each mission, but somehow having all that done for you just felt like it
was moving the game *way too fast*. In addition, while you auto-collect
all the resources in the area, meaning that you never have a shortage,
you don't have time to rebuild or take stock. This means that, while you
might win the current mission, you'll be horribly under-powered for the
next mission, and also unprepared with your groupings, and since many
missions start out very quickly this can be a BIG PROBLEM. You have to
make sure and keep an eye on what you're building and what ships are
damaged so that you can be at full, or close to full strength when the
missions ends. There might be an option to turn off the auto-jump, but
the game went by so fast on my first run through that I never had a
chance to look!
Now, don't get me wrong, the rushing didn't make
the game any more difficult. Quite on the contrary, I found Homeworld 2
to be a bit easier than the original. I completed it in about 8 hours of
total play time, while the original took at least several days (and
sleepless nights). But, that's also a problem, because it was over too
fast!
Cut scenes also come at an annoying rate and interrupt you
when you're trying to control the action, but you can't interrupt them
because you might miss something important (like the location of an
objective). In order to get around this sometimes I found myself just
watching some cut-scenes, and then reloading to an autosave before the
cut-scenes and skipping them. This was a problem in the original
Homeworld as well, but somehow I didn't find it nearly as annoying as I
did in Homeworld 2.
There were some things that I liked about
Homeworld 2, at least in theory. I liked that you could upgrade your
current ship designs. The only problem with this is that you never
really see the results. Do all your ships auto-upgrade? Did it make a
difference? Where do I see what benefit it had? Was it worth the
research or extra resources or time spent?
I liked that fighters
and corvettes had a natural place in the fighting. In the original, I
found myself neglecting my fighters and corvettes (my corvettes
especially, which seemed to be waste of resources). In this game,
however, I found that their role was much more prominent. Bombers could
effectively take out frigates, and were almost indestructable if the
frigates weren't escorted by gun-ships or interceptors. Interceptors, on
the other hand, were required to protect the bombers from other
interceptors, and to draw gun-ship fire away. Corvettes (except for the
mine layer corvette, which I managed never to have to build for any
mission at all) I also found to be very powerful, and I would often use
them as my preferred strike-craft defense when I sent in my own capital
or super-capital ships.
However, frigates seemed to have their
role deemphasized. Most of the time I found myself using frigates to
draw fire as my capital and super-capital ships were coming around and
my bombers and gun-ships (which were very effective at harassing enemy
capital and super-capital ships) made their way to the battle. I'd
almost always lose my entire line of frigates in the process (and I
normally ran with frigate formations of between 14 and 18 ships).
Also,
some frigates were almost completely useless except when they were
worked into a mission. These were specifically marine frigates and
defense frigates. Capturing ships was something I almost never had the
time to do (the enemy ships either went down too quickly, or the marine
frigates would just be canon fodder going in), and the defense field of
the defense field frigate required that you turn it on every time you
wanted to use it, and it only lasted a few seconds each time. That's
way, way too much micromanagement for me. Plus, the speed at which
missions progressed made it difficult to work these two special frigates
into the tactical picture.
I liked some of aspects of the
redesigned interface. The build and research screens still let you see
the battle. Being able to click on an object to go there, or to quickly
issue a move command to empty space was excellent. Having groups of
fighters and strike craft rather than individual fighters and strike
craft made it *much* easier for me to manage. Having the selected craft
appear in the bottom command area thing was excellent as well, as it
gave me an at-a-glance look at how they were doing damage-wise.
Some
aspects weren't so great, though, for instance the large, iconic
command buttons. Some of them made sense to me, some of them didn't. In
the end the buttons didn't matter much, because I used hotkeys almost
exclusively and had little time to even consider the buttons. This was
the case for most of the interface options that I might not have liked.
Sure, I might not have liked them, but I never really had the
opportunity to find out since I never used them.
There were some
things about the game that I found perplexing. For instance, in the
tutorial they give you a carrier with a cloaking device... But in the
single player mission line, you never encounter cloaking technology! The
enemy might have been using it, in retrospec, but it made almost no
difference at all. Why have cloaking technology in the game if it's
going to make no difference? Also, you could, in theory, capture ships,
but why would you want to? It was safer, easier, and more
resource-effective to just pre-build replacement ships. Plus, not having
to have a fleet of marine frigates on hand freed up slots for actual
damage dealing ships. You couldn't "overload" your fleet population like
you could in the original either (at least, I don't think you could,
maybe I'm wrong here), and captured ships really didn't have any new and
exciting capabilities to them (at least nothing that made a
difference), so where's the incentive? I remember in the original I
lived and died by what ships I could capture. I'd max out my frigate
count and then capture ion arrays (which were awful ships, but then, you
didn't feel so bad when you lost them) and multi-beam frigates (which
were very powerful, if a bit dangerous to your own friendly ships). In
this game, there's just no point in it. Also, you could attack
sub-systems on enemy capital and super-capital ships, but, again, why?
Sure, you could destroy the fighter production capability of a carrier,
but they'd just rebuild that subsystem so quickly that you might as well
have never bothered with the subsystem and just blown appart the vessel
itself. I remember one mission where I was confronted with several
carriers, and was trying to stop them from building additional strike
craft, so I destroyed the production facility on the first carrier, and
moved on to the second, and by the time the second carrier had it's
production facility destroyed, the first had rebuilt its own and had
already completed two squadrons of strike craft. DOH! Should have just
destroyed the carrier, and after I reloaded, that's just what I did.
Much easier.
In summary, this game was, in a few ways, an
improvement on the original. I think that some aspects of the game-play
are excellent. However, the thing that I took away from this game most
was: "What, that's all there is?"
Now, it might be better for
player vs. player, but I haven't tried that. For people looking for a
good single-player experience, however, I recommend going with the
original Homeworld, or with a different game entirely.
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