To this day, Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War is my favorite RTS game. With so much personality, unforgettable one-liners, and detailed animations, I was hooked. Ever since playing Dawn of War, I became engrossed in every RTS game I could find, hoping it’d bring the same excitement as summoning my first Bloodthirster. Yet, for all those RTS games I tried, I never played Homeworld.
The three dimensions of movement and strange sci-fi setting of Homeworld felt intimidating. With the third mainline entry on the horizon, I decided it was the perfect time to jump in.Homeworld 3has captured some of that charm from the golden age of RTS games, but it stumbles on its story and multiplayer offerings.
Broken down to its core, Homeworld is a game about survival. You start each game with a single mothership vessel and must beat the entire campaign without losing this ship. In Homeworld 3, that’s the Khar-Kushan, a prototype vessel deployed to investigate a threat within the far reaches of the galaxy. The mothership is the beating heart of your army. It’s where almost all of your units are constructed, and it’s your last line of defense should your army fall. Losing the mothership is an immediate game over. Everything else is expendable.
Consolidating base building to the mothership allows the focus to be placed on space combat itself, and these battles are a treat to experience. A sizable fleet turns the arena into a dazzling light show punctuated with torpedo missiles and reactor detonations. Dogfights occur near the ruins of derelict space stations from a bygone era or glacial sheets that eclipse your mightiest warships tenfold. I would frequently turn off my HUD and just take in the scale of it all.
All Navigators Welcome
And Homeworld gives you time to appreciate this scale. Starships move at a snail’s pace, resource collection can be automated with a single button press, and the game’s difficulty doesn’t demand intense micromanagement. Gameplay can be as simple as building units, giving them a formation type, and sending them off into battle.
That’s not to say that Homeworld 3 lacks strategic elements, however. The first notable change from most RTS games is the three dimensions of movement—units aren’t locked to a 2D plane. Starships can navigate around moving asteroids, find cover behind debris, and position themselves above or below other starships to create unique formations.
You can even guide ships internally through space stations to get the jump on unsuspecting enemies.
As liberating as this system sounds, it seldom comes up in actual gameplay. Unit AI tends to use cover well enough without supervision, and the camera makes it difficult to give precise movement directions in the thick of battle. Units will sometimes get confused and move too close or far to the designated location, assuming their AI doesn’t bug out and ignore the order completely, which happens rarely.
Still, Homeworld 3 serves as a great middle ground between a macro and micro-heavy RTS game. More casual players can sit back and enjoy the show, while veterans of the genre can appreciate the room to optimize their play through environmental cover and managing unit abilities and formations. It’s not the next StarCraft 2, but Homeworld 3 is a great jumping-on point to the RTS genre.
Sands And Sinners
Homeworld 3 is effectively a soft reboot of the franchise, removing most of the key players from the previous Homeworld games. The Hiigaran Empire’s latest navigator, Imogen S’jet, is sent to stop the growing Incarnate threat. She overcomes her self-doubt, finds allies deep within enemy territory, and becomes a legend like those before her. It’s the typical hero’s journey with no major twists outside of some fan service.
I wouldn’t classify Homeworld’s universe as hard science fiction, but it twists some of those hard sci-fi elements to create a tone of mysticism and slight melancholy. While reading up on Homeworld lore for this review, I was taken aback by just how interesting it all was. None of that creativity is built on or even borrowed in this installment. Homeworld 3 tries to tell a personal story about growth through adversity, but it fails to build a connection with the player in any meaningful way. Character motivations are paper-thin, and their personalities are virtually non-existent.
The good news is that the campaign missions themselves are great. While the pacing is a little brisk for my liking, Homeworld 3’s campaign uses its setting and gameplay systems to create memorable encounters. One of the earlier levels requires you to defend a remote hyperspace gate from waves of enemy forces, and the game showers you in turret ships to fortify the area. Another encourages stealth by keeping the mothership at a certain altitude, while a third requires aggressive play by splitting your fleet into multiple groups. The gameplay here is fantastic and varied. I just wish I could say the same about the story.
Multiplayer And PC Performance
Upon completing the campaign, Homeworld 3’s main offerings are standard multiplayer and War Games. Skirmish doesn’t have much content, featuring six maps and two playable factions at launch. More maps and factions will come with post-launch DLC, but this is a criminally low number for launch.
War Games is where I spent most of my time. It’s a co-op PvE game mode that blends roguelike elements with RTS gameplay, presenting randomized buffs as you complete objectives and harvest resources. The roguelike mechanics add a surprising depth to the mode and encourage experimentation in a genre that usually devolves into optimal build orders and strategies. It’s a great addition I hope more RTS games adopt.
PC performance was also quite poor. Playing on an RTX 4090 and Ryzen 9 7950X at max settings, the game frequently suffered from severe frame dips and shader compilation stutters. It’s not uncommon for the game to drop below 40 FPS during intense scenes. Homeworld’s slow combat and lack of intense micromanagement made these frame dips far less impactful than one might expect, but those sensitive to frame fluctuations might want to wait for a few patches.
Overall, Homeworld 3 is a solid game for new and returning RTS players. Creating massive armies and watching the digital chaos unfold is one of my favorite parts of this genre, and Homeworld 3 does it better than most RTS games I’ve played. With that said, diehard Homeworld fans will be polarized about this campaign. Waiting over two decades for a story that abandons the principles of its predecessors is a tough pill to swallow. And when you consider the paltry post-campaign offerings, I find it difficult to recommend Homeworld 3 at full price. It’s a good game that could be great with some patches and DLC, but as of now, I’d sit this one out.
