Review: Homeworld 3 Is Frustrating, Yet Fascinating

Homeworld 3 is a lot to process. There’s a lot of history to this series that I’m not familiar with, a lot of story, and a lot of hopes from long-time fans that saw over 8,000 people invest in a crowdfunding-investor scheme that eventually got canceled. It also doesn’t help that maneuvering in true 3D space just doesn’t play well with my brain. But despite all of that, I cant help be intrigued by the possibilities and idiosyncrasies the game presents, even if I’m fighting the controls most of the way.

For those new to the series, Homeworld‘s most defining feature is the depth of its gameplay, quite literally. While most RTS inhabit a relatively flat plane, Homeworld uses all three dimensions for its canvas, which can make for an extraordinary sight as dogfighters dance an intricate and deadly ballet around each other, dipping between nebulae and capital ships for cover. It also makes for a decidedly higher skill floor than your average FPS, and one I’m still struggling to reach.

There is an impressive suite of options and rebindable controls to help you navigate these extra dimensions though. In fact, there are so many I was near constantly looking back to the key bindings list or hopping back to the tutorial between missions to remind myself of certain features and controls. Developer Blackbird Interactive have done a pretty admirable job of making it fairly intuitive once you grasp them, but I still had a number of hangups with some commands. For one, while you usually have a nice click and drag option for selecting the height of your destination, clicking over a bit of asteroid or other terrain piece will place the target on its surface instead. The levels are full of these terrain pieces. You can override it with a plane tool, but in the middle of combat it’s fiddly to keep pressing that hotkey on and off even if you do rebind it to something more manageable. More than once I’ve had an errant click send my fighters straight past the bomber wing I wanted protected and over to investigate some fascinating rocks instead.

Some issues are more common strategy game gripes that the extra dimension only complicates. Having to reinforce and reassign command groups on the fly can be either a slight inconvenience or a complete chore depending on the game. In Homeworld 3, it’s definitely the latter. You can select entire groups of the same ship easily enough, but trying to split them into smaller taskforces to go after smaller objectives is a nightmare. Select multiple groups of ships and they’ll stick in their old formations instead of grouping up, which sounds useful but actually just ends up with you constantly having to re-click the formation button just to get a squadron to stick together.

When not fighting with you for control, the game is gorgeous. If constant pausing and re-issuing commands wasn’t a necessity, I’d happily spend entire fights watching individual fighters scramble to survive, or track the accumulation of battle damage on ponderous capital ships. There are some really nice effects too, like the dust blowing off the flat hull of your mothership and catching the light of a nearby star. I’ve never been much of a screenshot fiend, but this game might be what changes that.

But back to the game as a whole, there are a few main modes to play: multiplayer, a co-op roguelite mode, and the classic story campaign. There is a movie to get you caught up on the history of Homeworld‘s story, but I went in blind the first time and didn’t have too much trouble following along. It follows Imogen S’jet, a Hiigaran scientist turned navigator as she is interred inside a prototype mothership and sent out to prevent “The Anomaly” from causing the collapse of her civilization. The missions felt pretty varied, and flowed from dodging asteroids to desperate last stands to capturing nodes within rusting hulks of precursor structures. The campaign also has the interesting twist that you keep your units from the last map as long as you didn’t leave them behind when you hyperjump, which I imagine is part of the inspiration for the roguelite mode.

Like a lot of sci-fi, the plot is swimming in definite articles (THE Anomaly, THE Incarnate, THE Cores), and I confess I wasn’t immediately pulled in despite it not actually being too hard to follow. While your assailants being mysterious is part of the plot I still never got much of a sense of who they were or even what the Hiigarans were like as a culture, and while the ship designs are a cool combination of sleek and industrial they don’t really differentiate well between types or factions. Imogen, the main character, and her intel officer Isaac didn’t really compel me as characters, which isn’t helped by Imogen spending most of her time shaking her head and making faces from inside a water tank. That said I do have to applaud the voice work from Ike Amadi, who exudes the same kind of gentle authority he does in his much smaller role in Helldivers 2, and Elysia Rotaru who does a great job of selling Imogen as concerned but trying to hold it together. The brief moment of hesitation as she announces the destruction of a harvester unit is a great touch.

Then there’s the War Games mode, which follows in the trend of things like Honkai: Star Rail‘s Simulated Universe by taking an existing gameplay system and layering randomized upgrades and objectives over the top for more replayability, and of course the tantailizing allure of crafting a overpowered build. It’s a really promising idea, truly, but the cracks in Homeworld 3‘s foundation are only excacerbated by the more frantic missions with less downtime and the removal of the pause feature (likely due to the co-op capability, but still sorely missed in solo play). The finickiness of the ship behavious and the extra button presses required to execute basic movement commands all add up to be more frustrating than compelling, not helped by a lot of the more basic upgrades you get being simple percentage increases rather than new options for playstyles.

Ultimately, Homeworld 3 doesn’t quite hit the mark, but it does manage to demonstrate at least part of what made the series so compelling originally. If the game achieves nothing else, I hope it manages to reignite some interest in the series, or at least the concept. I think there’s a lot yet to explore with Real Time Strategy in a 3D space, and I know I’ll be looking to get a hold of the previous games to see what they did with it.

Homeworld 3 is immediately available for Windows PC via Steam and the Epic Games Store.