Games I Love: Homeworld Deserts of Kharak

The Homeworld series in general has long been a favourite of mine so it won't come as any surprise to find the prequel popping up on my blog. The RTS has become something of a rarity in this day and age which is a shame as it was for a long-time my favourite genre. I will do my level best to avoid giving any story spoilers, just in case. So whilst I plan out my written let's plays I figured I'd kill two proverbial birds with one stone, tackling my backlog and making blog posts about the games I play doing so!

The cut-scenes have a fairly unique art style

Unlike the original Homeworld titles which were set and played in space and allowed full 3D movement for units, Deserts of Kharak is as you might expect a lot more grounded. The whole game was built around a single line from the opening of the original Homeworld, which is kind of impressive.

The first two things that jumped out at me when I played this game were the amazing soundtrack (not surprising for a Homeworld game) and the art style of the cut-scene's you can see above. The Homeworld games have always had a pretty suitably epic soundtrack so I was more than pleased this one follows suit.

It plays pretty much like you'd expect a real-time strategy game with a few unique aspects that make it interesting, however. The first of which is your base which is actually a fully mobile carrier only rather than sailing the oceans or flying through space this one is based firmly on the ground. The second of which has been a feature of the campaign of Homeworld games since the first one, persistent resources and units between missions.

The carrier is the heart of your campaign, responsible for unit production and research.

The carrier itself acts as your unit production and research facility as well as what you'd expect any aircraft you might possess. Losing the carrier pretty much means game over but fortunately the carrier is more than able to defend itself due to the power management system it has to shunt power between various systems. You can pump up it's armour and repair beams to make it and surrounding forces more durable or you can opt to increase power to it's missile launchers and turrets turning it into a slightly terrifying mobile weapons platform.

The persistent units and resources adds another level of thinking to the game as rather than simply throwing masses of units at the enemy til you win, preserving your units is often smarter and more well rewarded. The most obvious benefit is due to the unit veterancy system, the higher rank a unit goes the better it gets, usually things like increased armour and hit-points or even higher weapon damage and range, depending on the unit in question. The other benefit is due to the fact that resources are limited, there is only a finite amount on each map and both resources are used not only for unit production but conducting research to unlock and improve new units. So losing a lot of units throughout the campaign can come back to bite you later on.

The resource system whilst fairly basic overall, featuring a common resource and a slighter rarer resource does have it's own unique quirk likely from it's original pre-Homeworld development origins. Typically to gain more resources and other objects that provide buffs called artifacts you break apart wrecks with explosives from your salvagers to get at the materials within.

This is only a small battle but it looks far better in motion than any picture could attest to.

The battles themselves can be pretty spectacular to watch thanks to the graphics on show, lighter vehicles circling isolated units, railguns firing from ridge lines with missiles and tracer fire going all over the place. Fighters zipping overhead and gunships showering down a hail of fire from above certainly helps showcase some fairly cinematic battles.

There is an element of the rock-paper-scissor when it comes to units, lighter faster units typically take out units like railguns, railguns take out more heavily armoured units and those heavily armoured units take out the light fast moving units. Though when you throw in larger units like the cruisers and factor in aircraft it starts to get a lot more interesting if you ask me!

The game is far from flawless however and whilst I do love it, Deserts of Kharak could have been so much more than it was, though I feel a lot of that was due to it's slightly troubled development.

• Lack of terrain variety: there is definitely some variety there due to various times of day and terrain features but for the most part you will perhaps unsurprisingly be fighting in desert for most of the game. More use of things like sandstorms or other unique terrain features would have helped a lot.
• Campaign Feels Short: I do genuinely feel the campaign could have likely been six or seven missions longer than it is. Wouldn't be so bad if there were other modes to play but it only has skirmish and multiplayer.
• Not much difference between factions: The differences are certainly there but they are usually minor which I imagine is for balance reasons though this is likely more of a gripe than a genuine flaw. 

Overall, short as it is, I still love the game and it's expanding of the Homeworld universe and enjoy it for what it is. There are definitely better real-time strategy games out there but I would be lying if I said I didn't enjoy Homeworld Deserts of Kharak and the story is tells which at least fills in some of the questions raised by the first game in terms of the lore.

I still long for the day when we actually get a Homeworld 3 but until then this and the remastered versions of the originals will have to do!

A battle in full swing!