Homeworld 1 was a wonderful game. It's interface provided a steep learning curve, but gave you so much control that you could pull off lots of tricks. Bouncing Battle Balls and Kami-Salvaging to get those sweet, sweet missile vettes in the second and third mission.

Actually, savlaging alone made that game worth it. Fleet carry over + no salvage limits + very limited difficulty scaling to fleet size = Grand theft starfleet. Few things were quite as satisfying as showing up at Higaara with the entire Taaidan fleet refitted and looking for some payback.

Plotwise, it had great atmosphere. An excellent story with a real sadness and desperation to it.


Cataclysm....well, it was good. Not great, but fun. Salvage was affected by the fleet limit, and even if it hadn't been, the massive fleets of the original couldn't have been achieved since you just plain couldn't salvage a Beast ship. The Beast itself came off as cliched as well - did they really think anyone was going to look at it without thinking "Hey, its the Borg. oh joy."?

On the bright side, the ships were a bit more interesting then the originals, at least for me. And no salvaging made the temptation to go all out ship thief go away, so I wasn't left with a huge fleet that I barely ever used because blowing something up meant I couldn't steal it.



Homeworld 2....well, not so hot. Far less control over your fleet then the original, scaling was way overdone, there were too many missions focused on the silly movers for my taste. Subsystem attacking, while implemented, was ultimately fairly useless. Salvage was again limited, and far less useful. The new squad based fighters made starfights far more useful, but turned frigates into the fleet cannon fodder - and you got a friggin voice message every time your cannon fodder frigates got blown up. Which they did. A lot. And the story wasn't as good. The Higaarns just came across as somewhat arrogant, and turning Karan S'jet into some kind of divinity figure didn't do the game any good.