Recent reviews by Skie

It's early access, so is just the first chapter so far and not perfect. But oh boy is it fun once you click with the physics and flight model which do not take long at all.

Weapons have a bit of variety (due a more thorough balancing in future) but I do appreciate when a game acknowledges that infantry being hit with .50 cal rounds won't just ragdoll, they'll puree. The destruction is good, explosions have a nice thump. Firing a well aimed rocket into a technical packed with bad dudes will never get old.

And I'm surprised at the quality of the writing and voice acting. It knows exactly what it is and gently leans into it more and more as the missions get grander and grander.

A configurable horde mode would be great. Usually I hate defence missions but the campaign has one where you defend the town which is a lot of fun and having a customizable version of that would be super fun.

The final boss almost ruined the game for me.

This is an awesome game that has some flaws that you can overlook while it's fun. For example upgrades don't feel necessary, partially because you can't actually 'feel' the difference for a while. They do help, but it's very hard to tell sometimes. Unit management is also frustrating, yes there are now hotkeys for Ranged, Melee and Hero units, but considering you can have a healer hero, a flying hero and a tank hero you still have to walk back and forth to position each on in the right place. Same goes for other units, the game just makes it hard to position manage them. If the selective command (F) actually indicated what it would select, that would really help.

But by far the biggest issue is the final boss. It's not that it's a hard fight, it's that you have to use a very particular build to even stand a chance. For a game that pretty much lets you do what you want and still make a success of it, to have the entire 15 encounter final map require multiple replays to figure out how to cheese the boss is pretty awful. And then you realise that he has a second phase which is even more frustrating to fight. It's almost Deus-Ex:HR levels of Boss design, all of them do something a bit different and challenge you, but none of them require an entire restart to figure out a strategy

The final boss has been changed since I initially wrote that paragraph. It hasnt quite fixed the frustrating design of the final encounter (something that utterly bypasses defences is always going to feel lame), but now it doesn't require a single approach to beat.

Homeworld fans will enjoy some aspects of the game but be incredibly frustrated by other issues that are glaringly obvious. Most of the frustrations can be patched, but the trope-filled story is the games biggest failing. If you just want to see spaceships explode spectacularly and play a fun roguelike MP mode then you'll be happy.


Graphics - The game looks gorgeous, with some of the latter missions being particularly unique.

Sound design - The usual amazing work on pilot comms, voices, weapons sounds etc is all here. Everything sounds like something from the Homeworld universe

Gameplay - It feels like Homeworld. A Homeworld more akin to HW2 than HW1, and some people will enjoy that. They're wrong, but that's okay as long as they don't ask for squadrons to be brought back.

Salvage - You can salvage destroyers with a single resource controller. They aren't great ships, but they're free!


The controls are almost great. The defaults have some frustrating foibles and the 'helpful' things like band-box selection assist needs to be toned down on the mothership/carrier as you end up selecting it when it is nowhere near the box. Multi-monitor users will get frustrated as the edge of your extended monitor will sometimes not scroll but sometimes it will.

Pathfinding - It's neat to see ships on neutral/passive actually hug terrain and probes take novel routes to distant targets around large structures. It's not perfect, large formations going through tunnels just causes temporary chaos, but it's generally okay. Unless it's the mothership, which likes to just hit large structures and stop dead instead of attempt to move around them.


Music - The soundtrack reminds me of the generic, dull soundtracks infesting many action films these days. As in it reminds me of nothing. Previous games had great soundtracks, from Imperial Battle to The Planet Killers. Music that set the tone of the mission, gave you goosebumps or made you worked as just a great theme whilst you micromanaged your way to victory. Homeworld 3 has nothing of note, no tracks that sound like I'm involved in a battle or building up to a confrontation.

Formations - Ships don't respect them, and only some formations seem to work reliably. Wall formation is just pointless as you end up with separate mini walls.

Ship behaviour - For certain targets, ships will seemingly prioritise them over everything else. No matter the ship type. So you get stupid behaviour like long range torpedo ships breaking off an engagement because a corvette is attacking them, and ion cannon frigates rolling around trying to hit ships passing them and ignoring the destroyer you're desperately trying to kill before it gets too close.

Also everything seems to have a fetish for turrets. Presumably because turrets have a huge engagement range (outside of their actual weapon range) so your ships respond to the attempt to attack them by flying up to them. Whereby they get engaged by many more turrets and ultimately wiped out. Final mission I'm looking at you with disappointment on my face. Even the mothership will do this which is infuriating. And the final mission sets all ships to aggressive stance with 200+ turrets to wade through, so if you don't catch that quickly oh boy you're in for some fun.

Stances - Passive is basically suicide mode, Neutral is mostly okay and Aggressive is herding cats mode.

Ship movement - Large ships are dense. They can't fly in formation, they move around like someone else is giving them move orders and if you aren't micromanaging large groups of frigates they will do the stupidest thing possible and then double down as soon as you look away.

Move orders/move disc - I played with classic controls, and found that the UI would happily let you issue a move order to a nearby location but when you rotate your view you can actually see the green move objective line is miles away. It's almost like the game decides where you click is an arbitrary value with an infinite possible distance, and the furthest away the better.


Scale - Ships feel small. You don't really get a sense of scale because corvettes, frigates, destroyers, and everything not a mothership is just all in the same size range.

Ship designs - The incarnate ships are actually half decent designs, harking back to HW2 designs. The Hiigaran ships are incredibly bland looking.

Megaliths - I never want to see another one of these ever again. We didn’t need the entire campaign based around every map having them, and 90% of them look identical thanks to them having the same textures or design aesthetic. Neat concept but utterly overused.

Campaign maps - I loved the huge maps of HW1, the slow build up to a major engagement and the few missions that had a much more intense close-in action kept it interesting and helped sell that you were getting to the final showdown. HW2 flipped that on its head and had way more up close and personal fights with wave after wave of enemies which wasn’t as fun, especially with them coming in from sources off the map you can't affect.

In HW3, every mission is in a small enclosed space, with huge numbers of ships being thrown at you constantly. Whilst you can destroy hangars or carriers to reduce production of enemy ships, the AI is cheating and ships do hyperspace in on some maps. Because of this, you don't get any prep time or space to breathe, so you need to be constantly multi-tasking, pausing and rebuilding losses. It lost the Homeworld feel pretty early on and other than one mission where you're sneaking for a small portion of it, the entire campaign is made worse because of the unending engagements. Even when there is a point in the story where you would expect to get a breather, you're dumped into a fight immediately.

The campaign maps also suffer from turretitis, curable with 15 torpedo frigates with their special activated. The final mission is obnoxious for this, but easy with torpedo frigates.


Yeah those CGI cutscenes are pretty awful and have a real uncanny valley feel to them, with bad lip-sync also not helping. Imogen is in a blender for some reason, too. Fleet Intel redeems it ever so slightly through a great performance by the actor and actually having his eyes open, but he still manages to produce a creepy grin every now and then. The editing and set pieces get worse and worse, and by the final scenes I actually rolled my eyes at just how bad it was.

Overall it's just a really amateurish telling of a resolution from multiple other franchises. All of which did it significantly better, and it just doesn’t feel like anything is earned. Imogen is a Mary Sue character if you read the backstory, and the whole focus on S'Jet and 'Lady Karen' feels like someone skimmed Wikipedia and wrote the story without actually playing the first two games.

Lore - The HW2 story retconned the award winning HW1 story to create a treasure hunt style story and HW3 doubles down on the retcons but also contradicts the mess HW2 made of the lore to give us a story that I've already forgotten.

Everything explodes. Everything is fun. The soundtrack is incredible. Why have you not you bought this game already?

Elements of Freespace, Homeworld and Battlestar Galactica combine to make this a phenominal space shooter. Oozes atmosphere and style and is actually full of variety for replayability.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ wyverns!

Great fun!

OMG he has white hair!

Do you like hats? Do you like running around with a hat that is as unique as a bank note that you have painted one of a few available colours? Do you still like hats?

Then TF2 may be the Hat simulator for you.