Homeworld: Cataclysm

The Good
It isn’t an add-on pack, but a completely new title. The gameplay was the best feature from the first Homeworld, and Cataclysm adds to that with some great new features and improving on others from the original. Much effort has been put into the presentation, with a nicely put together manual, great visuals, and a captivating story.

The Bad
You really need to be a pro of the original to get the best out of this. Still, it’s easier then the original in some ways, but beginners will struggle (with the story as well as the gameplay, if you are yet to play the first game)

The Bottom Line
A great follow-up to Homeworld. This is the type of game that deserves a movie or TV series. The story is an event in itself.

The Good
Homeworld broke ground in terms of the graphical layout of RTS games, mainly for games based in space; a fully 3D engine that gives the player the ability to view the situation in a full 360 degrees. Definitely a enormous leap past the stale 2D world of StarCraft and the like. However, Homeworld in my opinion was severely crippled by a few things. The interface was atrocious, moving your ships around was a headache, your Mothership was completely static and unmovable, and resources were quite scarce no matter what the difficulty setting. In general, the learning curve was frustrating and much too steep for most players.

I was relieved, to put it mildly, when Homeworld: Cataclysm was released. All the anomalies that plagued the original Homeworld were fixed, while the core gameplay that made the prequel stand out amongst all other RTSs is still present. For starters, in the interface was fixed, so instead of having navigate a bunch of hidden menus, they were constantly present for easy access. Moving your ships this time around only involves pressing one or two keys, rather than once again having to navigate into other menus or command screens. Regarding resources, they appeared to me to be much more plentiful in Cataclysm, which gives the player a rest when it comes to micromanagement. What if resources are too far away? You simply move your little fleet to them, because you can move your Mothership! What if the resources are too close to the enemy? Simple yet again, since there is a new ship called an 'Ore Processor' which accompanies your Worker ships to far away locations to collect resource, and they don't have to return to the Mothership to drop cargo! This too also relieves the veritable migraine known as micromanagement. Also, there are many new types of ship in Cataclysm that make managing resources and fighting battles much more convenient, the details of which I won't go into here; you'll find out for yourself.

The Bad
I can say that I have no hard complaints about this game at all. The only thing I would've added to this game is the option for an isometric viewpoint while still being 3D, which for me might make fighting battles and reconnaissance a bit easier. But that's only because I've grown so accustomed to playing RTS games in isometric view. Also, alot of people have complained that the plot of Cataclysm is cliche. This may be true to an extent, but a good plot in a game these days is very rare to begin with. Besides, the first Homeworld borrowed heavily from Battlestar Gallactica...

The Bottom Line
As I said above, I really do wish that the original Homeworld had been this good. Everything that I disliked about the first game was repaired in Cataclysm. To be brutally honest, after playing Cataclysm, my Homeworld box has been collecting dust in the closet for the last 3 and a half years. Yes, it really is that much of an improvement. I may play it again some day, but I don't foresee that happening very soon. And now that Cataclysm is priced between $9-$15, it's a perfect time for those who missed out to take heed of the best space RTS ever made.

Did I mention that you can move your Mothership?

The Good
Cataclysm is both an improvement and a degradation of Homeworld. The goods:

The control system. Barking Dog Studios obviously took a lesson from the feedback Relic got about Homeworld, and were quick to add lots of nifty features. They added a waypoint system (one of the most-praised aspects of the game, although I don't use it much), moved special functionality to the right mouse button (in Homeworld you have to double-click, do it too slow and you end up selecting the target ship), made the game far more compatible with multiple commands (one thing I HATED about Homeworld was giving dock orders to repair corvettes, since double-clicking on the Mothership was always interpreted as a repair command), and made it possible to view the movement orders of strike craft. The mission timer is a wonderful tool, and the in-game message system is neat as well. In Cataclysm, unlike in Homeworld, you can easily customize your screen while in-game, and you can "filter" stuff on the sensors manager.

Anything else? The graphics are a slight improvement over the original Homeworld, and the cinematic sequences are a novel feature that I have not seen in the original game (the closest thing to them in Homeworld is the Mothership launch sequence). Some of the background music is great, although the same could be said for the original.

Some of the ship ideas were interesting, notably the Mimic and Linking technology. The mutability of the Somtaaw Command Ship and the self-allocating abilities of the Beast are equally novel.

The Bad
The bads:

The plot. Some people are planning to make a "Rebel Alliance vs. the Borg" mod. Enough said. I would have preferred a continuation of the original story over a digressing plot involving an assimilationist creature. The entire idea, as well as some details (the Beast "mutates" ships instead of "upgrading" them) smack of unoriginality.

The balance. Unlike Homeworld, which emphasized strategy and ship combination, Cataclysm seems focused on super-ships. The multi-beam frigate is a notable example (it can beat most ships as large as itself or smaller) of ship interactions receiving less priority than new ideas. Likewise, the final mission is entirely based on destroying two super ships, and you beat it by using a super-ship of your own (I can't say more). Compare this to Homeworld, where the final mission was a showdown between two large and diverse fleets (although, to be honest, your fleet by then is so huge that only the first wave is any trouble). In addition, the game's technological advances eventually render some ships useless. Once your enemy implements advanced sensor technology, for instance, all your Leeches and Mimics go overboard. Homeworld also had advanced sensors, but they were either limited in range or limited in sensitivity.

Another complaint is that the game, especially in single-player, is heavily geared towards micromanagement, so there are problems when going from single to multiplayer. The Mimic, although it is a very neat ship and presents some different angles from Homeworld's traditional cloaking, usually requires a menu for its special ability. Imagine the problem in carefully selecting a ship to imitate just when you need to orchestrate an attack on multiple fronts!

The Bottom Line
A nice game, whose features force you to play differently from the original. Also, as I said above, Cataclysm has a decidedly superior user interface to Homeworld. However, I personally find that the original game provides a better experience in terms of gameplay, and I hope Homeworld 2, when it comes out, will incorporate the best of both games.