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Please don't waste your money!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 26
Date: March 02, 2000
Author: Amazon User

At first the game was great. The graphics were excellent and gameplay was fun, but after I started getting into it, it all changed. The ships would only follow my orders after nagging and begging them to do so. It was as if they were to good to fight for their colony and just decided to stay at home and eat cold pizza. I tried over and over to correct this problem. I ended up shooting several bullet holes in the CD. Basicly, the game just has to many glitches and is very poorly made. So, please do not waste your money on this game. There are much better ones out there.

Sierra confused technique with gameplay

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 38 / 51
Date: November 30, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Ok, at the risk of being labeled a spoil-sport, I'll say I didn't like Homeworld. The concept is creative, the design elegant, the graphics impressive, the soundtrack awesome. The AI is dim-witted; the interface ridiculous, and the gameplay annoying.

First, I like the idea of a 3d tactical space game. Too many of them (notably Star Fleet Command) are entirely too two dimensional. Of course, making a space sim 3-d means you need to be able to look at the "map" from different perspectives. Sadly, you can spend as much time managing the camera as you spend fighting your forces. Not a good combination.

Second, the AI is incredibly dumb. I didn't have as much problem with avoidable collisions as one reviewer, but my fighter pilots had this nasty habit of launching out of the mothership and then parking while the battle raged around them. I shouldn't have to go tell newly minted units to fight back. Especially since I couldn't see them to tell them to get their rears in gear most of the time. (That doggone perspective camera-management problem again.) This is a real drawback when you have a lot of units on the map, which makes too many demands for micromanagement.

Last, the gameplay is annoying because I spent as much time trying to figure out how to play as I spent playing, only to be annoyed with the dumb AI and camera management tasks once I had the interface down. Not a good sign

Bottom line: The game has potential, but the learning curve is too steep and the minor problems too distracting to make it fun. If you want a game that looks good when you play and has a great soundtrack; and if you don't mind a steep learning curve or large micromanagement demands, this is it. If you're on a limited game-buying budget, don't have a lot of time on your hands, and would settle for something less technically impressive but more fun to play, then Homeworld isn't for you. It wasn't for me.

Frustrated quick w/this one

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 0 / 3
Date: April 11, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I bought it after all the great reviews and game of the year award...I was disappointed and got frustrated managing the views. I also had a hard time getting it to be compatible w/my sound card. Sierra's support helped me but only after several days via email.

Good but not Great

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: March 27, 2000
Author: Amazon User

This game is beautiful and very intruiging at first. The interface is consice and the story starts off good. About the 4th mission I started to give up. All the missions are scripted. The AI usually won't do anything until it is triggered which gives you plenty of time to get an army, or not, together. Usually I would spend all my money and still not have a big enough fleet to complete even the 4th mission. Your ships, money, and resources carry over from one mission to the next so be careful. Bad management could leave the game unfinishable.

A excellent game, but very buggy!

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: November 14, 2000
Author: Amazon User

Everyone is a right. Homeworld is a game that introduces us to a whole new kind of game. This is not a regular third-person 3D game. It's not like Myth/MythII where there is a limited rotatation around characters and the action. In Homeworld, you can *fully* rotate around ships and other objects in a real 3D world. Over the top, under the bottom, and spin around ships. It actually takes some getting use to, once you do, it's amazing. Another plus is the amazing graphics of not only the ships and objects, but also the explosions, thrust of the ships engines, ships "jumping" into and out of hyperspace, and the other eye candy.

After a couple hours playing this game, you will find yourself in the Homeworld universe; you will feel like you are really there. However, Homeworld is not all eye candy, it has a really good story that will keep you stuck to the game and the plot line.

But why did I give this game only 2 stars? It is probably the buggiest game I have ever played, and many of the most anonying bugs were never fixed. I had a number of times where I would hit a bug where I could not complete the level and had to step to the previous level! I would save the buggy game and reload it, still messed up. Would step back to a previous save on the same level, and it would still be messed up. If you hit these bugs in multiplayer, you were screwed (I remember the "build bug" would halt production of large ships). I never did have an enjoyable multiplayer game, since someone in the match would always hit one of the nasty bugs. After that, they would be easy to knock out of the game. The buggyness of Homeworld has prevented me from buy Homeworld 2.

Not hooked

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 1 / 3
Date: April 24, 2007
Author: Amazon User

If a game doesn't hook me within the first half-hour then I'm just not going to see it through to the end. Homeworld just seemed like Age of Empires: In Space to me and the slow, confusing gameplay really got on my nerves. I know that this game has an Army of fans who will denounce my comments, but I simply could not get into it.

Usually, I like space games and I was hoping that this would have a Star Trek-ish feel to it. I also quite the Wing Commander games and since it only cost me 99p then I thought I might as well give it a go. Call me shallow, but it didn't give me instant satisfaction and uninstalled it after only 45 minutes.

eh, I've played better

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 1
Date: February 10, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I got this game over command and conquer because the reviews were off the chart. Unfortunately I was wrong, it's not as fun as I'd hoped. I realize this game is more than a few years old and I'm not a guy who needs good graphics to enjoy a game, but this game was just frustrating for me. Maybe I didn't give it enough of a chance. I'll stick with 2D RTS games thank you.

Ok, but too slow

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 0 / 2
Date: February 06, 2001
Author: Amazon User

When I first got this game I thought it was perfect, but once I got to many ships, I couldn't move my mouse at all. Anyway I thought it had pretty good graphics as long as it didn't freeze. I suggest this software to anyone who has a very fast computer.

The AI bites!

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 16 / 17
Date: November 15, 1999
Author: Amazon User

Awesome Graphics: Just look at the images.

Adequate Controls: considering it is completly 3D, but it could've been better.

Decent Storyline: It has a pretty well thought out plot to this game... not great, but better than most RTS games.

Game Play: It was fun at first, but I got bored with it after one week after playing 2 hours a day with it.

MultiPlayer: It's pretty cool, if there aren't too many players (anything more than 4). And I can't comment much more on this, since everytime I tried to play a MultiPlayer game, I get disconnected, or one of the other players get disconnected. All I can say is that this game was not designed for a telephone modem bandwidth.

AI: Well... ummm... boy does this AI suck! I had ships colliding into other ships and in effect destroying themselves! And no I didn't tell them to use Kamikazee on any ships. I had to restart many missions because of this... ( I don't like to lose all my capital ships, because they don't know how to stay clear of the enemy's mother ship and then end up colliding with it and getting destroyed in the process! ) The only way I could avoid this, was to focus all of my attention on these attacking ships and then manually move all the ships out of the way of the mothership; which is really tedious, considering the controls and the fully emerged 3D environment.

Overall: This is a decent game, except for the poor computer AI, and that I don't have a better connection other than a 56K modem =(. It might actually be fun finishing a multiplayer game.

In some ways better, in some ways stuck in the past

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 3 / 6
Date: June 30, 2000
Author: Amazon User

I must say that I enjoyed Homeworld... for a while. I did not, in all honesty, finish the game because I felt it degenerated into a pure slugfest, no tactics or strategy involved (for the most part). The short summary is that Homeworld is a fairly typical harvest resources, build forces, kill the enemy sort of game. A couple frills with the attempted 3D interface and the salvage capabilities, but nothing to write home about. If you want real-time strategy, there are better choices out there.

First, though the game is, in theory, 3D, very little is actually done in 3D, and the interface for trying to do so is difficult to manage. Almost the entire game takes place in effectively one plane (for the core game, there are a couple of exceptions). So, while the 3D idea is neat, very little is done to develop and exploit it. Second, very little strategy seems to be involved in the game. The interface is a little too clunky and micro-manage centric (to use any units with intelligence, YOU must be in direct control of them) to allow for grand tactics and strategies, and there is a sad emphasis on the captial ships. To a large degree, you can do entirely without fighter class ships (once you reach a certain tech level). Obviously, game designers have yet to notice that there are often very good reasons for having smaller stuff on the scene. The formations attempt to bring some semblance of order to the game, but those same formations rapidly disappear in actual combat, making them fairly pointless. Third, unit intelligence is miserable. This is not a problem liited to Homeworld, but seems to be endemic to the strategy genre. Fight to the death, you cannot establish a target priority intelligence. you cannot setup a series of orders (shoot your designated target unless something juicier or more deadly appears, run to a certain staging area if you are damaged, guard this ship, but do not leave it's immediate vicinity, etc.).

On the plus side, the game is pretty smooth. The views are great, and the perspective control is very useful (though a camera angle change could be nice, ie, view out from a unit's perspective, rather than always looking at a particular unit or view of any area, rather than a unit). The repair/refuel and docking capability is cool, as is the ability to jump around the map (mp only though). Sadly, I don't think the game lived up to its hype.

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