GALAXY QUEST

HOMEWORLD 3 is a flashy, ambitious RTS, but some of the original magic is missing

- Fraser Brown

The sight of Homeworld 3’s sleek, indomitable mothership preparing to jet off into the unknown, accompanied by radio chatter and a moody score, feels like a homecoming. For newcomers, it’s a striking scene; for veterans, it calls to mind the original mothership getting ready to leave Kharak—the beginning of one of the best strategy games ever created. It’s enough to make you all tingly.

Homeworld 3 wants to remind you of its legacy a lot, especially in the campaign. After the events of Homeworld 2, Karan S’jet, the mothership’s navigator, was sent on a mission to deal with a looming crisis, but she never returned. Twenty years later her protégé, Imogen S’jet, is following in her footsteps, with a new mothership and a new fleet that must strike out on their own, once again without support.

But where the original Homeworld often took a minimalist approach—from its narrative to its map design—Homeworld 3 is comparatively busier, with maps full of debris and terrain, and a story that constantly wants you to take a break from the fun stuff so you can listen to boring conversations in hideous cutscenes that look ripped from a bad ’90s sci-fi game. The plot is mostly forgettable nonsense and I confess I checked out pretty quickly. The good news, though, is that the missions are largely brilliant.

Each of them puts the fleet in a new kind of peril, and there are some real doozies. You’ll be hiding from enemies in nebulae; commandeering gargantuan, monolithic space complexes; setting up elaborate blockades, using turrets and mines to create corridors of death; and sabotaging factories in kamikaze strikes. I even kinda enjoyed the return of another ‘avoid the asteroids’ slog, because nostalgia has poisoned my brain.