Homeworld 2 (PC)

First off, several of the niggling little interface issues that had bugged me during HW1 have been nicely solved. The on-screen display is well thought out, with lots of the information you need right there as you need it. Commanding squadrons rather than individuals is an excellent new idea.

Secondly, as someone who doesn't play online (I have had my fill of testosterone-poisoned adolescents with kewl illiterate spelling skillz) I value the single-player missions the most and here HW2 delivers well. Lots of variation in the approaches needed and several missions that took at least five attempts to do perfectly.

Finally, it's at least as beautiful as the original but on a larger scale; some of the battles are titanic in scale, with hundreds of ships.

The only thing that I'd change (apart from more missions) is the tendency of the game to take over when you've completed a mission. For example, at the end of Mission 14 I left the final target spaceship unkilled just so I had time to rebuild my fleet, mop up the last few Vaygr and generally have fun. On HW1 it was my choice when to end the mission, HW2 does it for you. But that's a pretty minor gripe.

Would I recommend it? If you liked HW1 and/or Cataclysm, yes, go and spend the money. I don't think you'll be disappointed.

The biggest problem I have with Homeworld 2 is the Single Player storyline. The original HW had a simple premise, yet enough variety to make it my favourite PC game of all time. Homeworld 2, however discards this approach and tries to pull off a story of godlike technology that will easily confuse or annoy many. I would love the story if it was actually somewhat watertight, yet HW2 lacks even adequate narration and the player is constantly left bemused as to what they're doing, and why they're doing it.

Worse still is the near total lack of Nonplayer "pirate" races like those in the original (e.g. the Taiidan, Kadesh, Turanics etc). Relic have made the dire mistake of giving us a single enemy race, a boring race of ancients, and a few fleeting appearances by the enigmatic Bentusi, resulting in little, if no variety. Anyone who knows the ins and outs of HW1 development cycle may be in for a little surprise in the final mission, even if “it” isn’t used in quite the way it should have been.

Despite these faults, the gameplay is good fun (even if it takes some getting used to), and the Storyline does have its moments... Yet one can't help noticing these and wondering on how much better it could have been if all the negatives had been identified and worked on. More missions would also have been nice. The difficulty of HW2 is hotly debated, yet the game is probably too easy because:
1) The game gives you far too many resources, so even if you fleet dies, you just rebuild it,
2) There are too few missions anyway.

As a final note, a lot of the reviews currently on Amazon do pick out elements of play that simply take some getting used to. If someone has a problem with elements that have “disappeared”, they have simply been reworked (for instance, frigates can hyperspace -with- a capital ship fitted with a Hyperspace module. Even fighters can now do this, so there are some benefits in this new system, and the old one is outmoded, and you simply have to adjust to it.)