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| The day after I broke down and got this they finally patched in Tactical Pause. by Can't get no satisfaction. NEGATIVE 11/23/2017, 3:31pm PST | ||||
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| I'm five hours in. The first game and Cataclysm helped define my idea of good aesthetic, narrative, do don't show etc. They were good attempts at epic storytelling in a strategy game. Homeworld 2 was significantly weaker than both but still had enough of the aesthetic and brought across the sense of scope. DoK fails to capture this. The substitution of desert for striking space backgrounds is a trade down, the campaign so far is all characters telling you how cool everyone is in between barking call and response ops orders like we're trying to be legit military combat, everyone is a forgettable nothing.
The enemy is a bunch of mask-wearing techno-zealot fremen knock-offs with cooler ships than you, yours look like Tonka trucks but boxier. The combat chatter between units has more personality than the main character - we first see her sitting in the middle of a Sahara dune in enemy territory, holding up the show, no explanation for her doing some morning meditation alone and exposed five minutes before they all have to leave like why can't this woman be ready on time!??!? Then she turns on the least interesting mothership in the franchise, they roll out of home base right before it gets destroyed and leave with the usual two-unit initial fleet. Even though these are land vehicles the game calls them a fleet and uses nautical terms for half the unit classes in an attempt at franchise continuity. Instead of trying something fresh, the devs cranked out a carbon copy of a tutorial level from 1999 to try and one-up Fallout's callback game, making their female lead look like a time-wasting ditz who sits around getting sand in her panties instead of finishing her job in her meantime. Later, someone says she's really brave. Having taken care of character assassination by dropping a ton of ham on the only named woman every male voice in the game then proceeds to whiteknight (down to order confirmation chatter), everyone can roll out just ahead of the enemy. The enemy promptly explodes the first base offscreen. We are told they also explode all the other bases. This is an attempt at ramping up the pace without spending the money on assets required to properly manage franchise continuity (like with Tanis) - the game from 1999 managed to instill a sense of urgency that drove pace really well so the devs decide they don't need to bother, that box is already checked for them. Besides, there's a poorly explained religious war on for an artifact the plot needs. The UI insists on having different hotkeys & buttons for unit special abilities that are unavailable when selecting mixed groups. Everything has so little health that trying to micro while issuing realtime hotkey commands to mayfly-lived light units is a clusterfuck. This is not remotely helped by the way the desert, the dust, and the sea of your construction vehicle colored units all blend together into a yellow-beige mash. Only one unit so far can steal enemy units, which was the entire point of the Homeworld single player campaign. They didn't bother to get a stentorian voice actor in the late Campbell Lane's stead, which is half of what made the whole thing work as an Odyssey in Space (the other half was a sky that made all that 'rosy fingers of dawn' shit from homer make sense). I want to blame Gearbox but the dev lead inspired no confidence in me. The music is still good. Will finish it because I am a whore, 7/10. |
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Anyone here playing Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak? NT by 06/15/2016, 8:03pm PDT  Played it for a bit. Fun throwback RTS. by 06/16/2016, 3:24am PDT Thanks. 7/10 means I'm pouring hours into it cause nostalgia & franchise loyalty NT by 06/16/2016, 12:21pm PDT The day after I broke down and got this they finally patched in Tactical Pause. by 11/23/2017, 3:31pm PST |
