Homeworld

The Good
Good graphics. That's mostly it. The graphics are impressive in their own time, and almost entirely run the game. Also, it didn't seem to crash very often or have many errors, and it was possible to move in 3D, a rarity in games. Finally, resources transfer over from levels.

The Bad
It's a slow game, with complicated controls, especially difficult missions, boring music, and a token, nonsensical storyline.

To elaborate, perhaps one of the biggest, though by no means only downsides of this game is the music. First, it's slow and boring, like a lullaby, that makes you want to fall asleep, but worse. For a non-turn-based game to be good, you at least have to convey that there's some excitement involved, even if in reality space is vast and lonely. Second, there's not much choice of music, and you end up listening to the same songs over and over again. Third, it doesn’t have much variety. They all sound pretty much the same, so you really don't have much choice if you don't like it, besides turning it off. Then, there's the game itself. Its graphics will probably entice you to buy it, but after you're gotten over your amazement in the first few levels, you realize there's really not much fun in the missions. They're complicated by the dizzying array of controls and uses of keys, made even worse by the very thing that was supposed to make it better, 3D, so that you get the feeling you have no business commanding a fleet, and would be better off controlling just one or two ships, but you can't if you want to succeed. And even if you do succeed with the missions, and get over the boredom, it'll eventually become to difficult to complete at all, even if you think you've done all you could in the prior missions, making you wonder if you should go back and try those boring missions again.

Then, to make a long review longer, there's the storyline, which is a whole topic in itself. You can read the entire manual (which I did), listen carefully to every word said in the beginning movie and in-game, and play more than halfway through, but it won't make a difference. You still won't get it. You can start as either of two factions, though I think there's only one or two differences between them, then fight the other side when you play. But you never figure out why you're fighting. Which is fine for the first few missions, but then it starts getting really, really frustrating as you go on and start struggling, not knowing who you're fighting. You don't even get to see people's faces, so you don't know what you look like, but soon you start thinking "Hey, I've dragged in almost a dozen ships with their pilots still alive, how come no one simply asked them why they're shooting at us?" It makes a player angry, like playing a text adventure where there's an obvious answer, but the program can't seem to recognize it. You're some race living on a desert planet, leave it for your homeworld...but someone wants to stop you? WHY? Maybe you find out in the end, maybe not, but I was fed up before that happened. I finally snapped when it came to an asteroid level, about halfway through the game. For some reason not explained in the game, your mothership must fly through an asteroid field at a constant speed. No reason why, no explanation for why you can't just go around, above, or below it, why you can't stop, clear a path, and continue when it's clear, or why you can't harvest their resources (by the way, it also doesn't make sense that you can find all the resources necessary to make ships in just a few asteroids. Last I checked, most asteroids were made of just a few elements and compounds, so unless your people, whoever they are, know alchemy, I don't see how you can turn iron into uranium, radon, or whatever materials you need to build spacecraft), for which the asteroid belt seems to contain a wealth of, and use them to make a huge fleet and fully upgraded Mothership. That just took the cake for me, and I stopped playing the game.

The Bottom Line
A waste of money. It beacons you to buy it with it's fancy graphics and the feeling it's a "new" game, then entices you further with it's token plot, but when you get down to it, the game hardly makes any sense, and its faults combine to make it a boring, stupid, difficult game, that stops being fun after the initial shock at its newness wears off around level 3 or 4. You'd have to have a mighty strong suspension of disbelief, and a very weak sense of adventure to enjoy this game, plus be either superhuman or have massive perseverance to finish this game. I can't comprehend why this game got a 3.9 out of 5, unless the people here rated it after just playing the first two levels, or just looking at the box.