Homeworld Remastered impressions: A refined masterpiece

If you're a game company looking to release an HD remake this year (and looking at the 2015 release schedule, there are plenty of you out there), then the Homeworld Remastered Collection is one of the better blueprints you could look to.

As the name implies, this isn't just a remake of the Relic’s 1999 masterpiece Homeworld. The package also Includes a revamped version of the slightly less classic (though still quite good) Homeworld 2, as well as unaltered versions of both games for absolute purists out there who like their three-dimensional space strategy raw and low-res. Those who don't mind sacrificing historical accuracy for convenience will find familiar gameplay from a one-of-a-kind duology that’s prettier than ever.

That much is clear just from replaying through the first few missions in both included single-player campaigns—the atmospheric heart and soul of Homeworld. What’s still unclear is Gearbox's new "unified" multiplayer, which encompasses both games but was not accessible prior to launch. Even when the game is fully released, players will initially have access to a multiplayer beta rather than the final experience.

Even with that limitation, Remastered is still a masterful collection of games not quite like anything that's come before or since. While real-time strategy games have been on the decline as a genre for years now, Homeworld was unique even before the Command and Conquer- and Warcraft-makers of the world moved on to more profitable things.

Unlike those competitors, Homeworld 1 and 2 were truly 3D strategy games. Having a fleet of starships swoop and twirl through the X, Y, and Z axes allows for all sorts of pincer maneuvers and squad formations that were just impossible on a more common 2D plane. Besides that, the armadas of Homeworld are continuous: What you build, harvest, and research in one mission carries over to the next, making every loss meaningful and every encounter potentially devastating.

New look, new interface

That feeling of responsibility hasn't changed much in 16 years, even though the way the game looks has changed immensely. Modern hardware doesn’t just bring higher resolutions, it also makes both games feel like entirely new beasts—a completely new shell wrapped around some classic gameplay.

That shell includes an entirely new shared user interface courtesy of developer Gearbox Software. Gone are the masses of drop-down menus and compulsory hotkeys that plagued the originals. They've been replaced with a fixed interface that offers control buttons hovering constantly in the foreground. It's a small but welcome change. The fact that both games now share the same interface also makes jumping from one game to the other a very smooth experience.

The new interface also allowed Gearbox to pick and choose the best elements of both titles. The original Homeworld 2, for instance, dropped many of the tactical options of its predecessor: formations that let you arrange fighters into spheres or order them to make a suicide slam into carriers, for instance. The sequel did, however, have a better grasp on controlling units in 3D space. Now, both games allow you to create the original game’s orbiting, kamikaze death-balls with the control fidelity of the sequel.

There are also a few enhancements new to both games. For the original game, ship models, voice acting, and even the 2D animated cut scenes have been completely reworked or re-recorded. The almighty mothership that carries your contiguous fleet from mission to mission has a depth and scale not present in the 1999 version, for instance, and given how much time is spent staring at this iconic space banana, that's a welcome upgrade.

So much of what makes Homeworld work is the atmosphere: the story of an endangered tribe fleeing one annihilated world in favor of another. It makes for a desperate, lonely feeling with a touch of pride centered on a scrappy, ever-evolving fleet. The updated visuals drive that feeling home in a way that the old and jagged polygons of 1999 can no longer achieve.

The changes to Homeworld 2 are less obvious. Four years' difference in graphics technology makes the original version look pretty snazzy to this day, meaning there was less need for improvement In the revamp. The sequel Is also different tonally, adopting a more traditional sci-fi action story over the original's oppressive solitude.

A weaker sequel

Thanks to the shared controls in Remastered, though, both games now "feel" more or less identical, a fact that actually makes me appreciate the sequel a little less. Before now, Homeworld 2 could always lean on being the sharper-looking, better handling of the two. This is much less true in the Remastered package, making it easier to judge the follow-up game on the merits of its story and atmosphere alone.

It's not like the sequel's plot is bad. The first game simply pulled off a trick that only works once. The near-extinction and mass exodus of the games’ protagonist race, the Kushan, couldn't work a second time, so Homeworld 2 leans on a tale of super-weapons, sci-fi warlords, and an alien "progenitor" race. That last note in particular didn’t feel quite so played out in 2003, but it seems incredibly clichéd after an additional decade of tripping over scores of alien forerunners in games.

That doesn't stop Homeworld 2 from being fun, of course. The level of control you have over your fleets is still impressive—more so than ever, in fact, thanks to the blended user interface. It also means you can only blame yourself when you fail to micromanage corvette repairs or an interceptor targets properly and start the next level with fewer ships than you ought. With more control in Homeworld 2 comes more of the first game's sense of responsibility imbued into every decision.

If there's a real negative to level at this collection, it's that it only remixes and remasters old content rather than offering anything truly new. At this point in the recent wave of such graphical overhauls, it’s easy to be a bit fatigued by the whole concept of HD remakes like this. It's wonderful that important curiosities like Homeworld and Grim Fandango can have a second chance, of course, but there's less and less to say about how wonderful that is.

In the case of Grim Fandango, at least, there was some new context for the game through developer commentary. Homeworld Remastered, for as singular as it is, could have benefited from something similar. That role could be filled by a vital multiplayer community, but it’s too early to tell how likely that is to develop. Selling the game as a full product while promising only a "beta" multiplayer mode at launch doesn't exactly inspire hope.

Even without the multiplayer, though, the campaign has always been the core of Homeworld. That much holds up just fine, no matter what decade—or what version of this classic series—you play.