Recent reviews by Phrix

The game is a massive disappointment after backing it on Fig years ago. I replayed all the Homeworld games in anticipation of playing this and you'd think it was made by different people entirely.

Combat is a mess, you feel like you have barely any control when compared to the other games. Path finding and AI are horrendous, units get stuck on terrain, wont target, wont prioritise, forget orders. They spin in circles trying to target something or move past it and can't track. Units will just sit there doing nothing unless you handhold their every move. I had engagements where almost no damage is being dealt because every ship has the turning circle of a cruise ship. Everything is a straight downgrade from all previous games. I do not understand how this feels so clunky compare to the other games; and whoever decided to go back to single strike craft building needs their head examining.

It feels like the only way to get through the game is to either death ball and let Jesus take the wheel or constantly pause and micromanage everything. Strike craft get annihilated straight away every engagement and you cant get them out of danger like the other games because of how painfully slow they are, yet the enemy's are a constant issue because the relevant ships will target everything but the thing they're designed to deal with. I never feel like i have a handle on a battle or am able to employ tactics. Some ships move so slow they're borderline useless.

Even worse is the story. Homeworld is a story about a people discovering their history and carving a path across the galaxy to return home. Cataclysm gave you a big bad, but it expanded on the society in the aftermath of the return to Hiigara and the differences between the Kith. HW2's wrong headed retcon hyperspace core nonsense was always a change i never understood, but at least the game played like Homeworld and the gates at the end held promise. This story doubles down on hyperspace is now magic and you need 'navigators', instead of hyperspace being a tool used by anyone with a ship big enough, then makes the whole story about four individuals floating in hyperspace heaven instead of what the story was originally about, a people.

What happened in the universe between games? What happened with the gates? What happened to the council? The other galactic players that the previous games hinted at? No it's just here's a 2/3's scale mothership, a ship smaller in fact than ships that are populating the background in the first mission and a generic evil empire with zero explanation. Then radio silence from Hiigara because hand wave plot reasons.

The story is awful and terribly written and dripping in melodrama and cliche. I thought Starfield's story was going to be as bad as it get's but this is somehow even worse.

The Starcraft / Civ era character models for the cut scenes are an utterly bizarre choice. Why change the story telling language so drastically for something so dated? Imogen's shockingly bad hair and poorly proportioned face in that inexplicably large tank left me speachless at how poor it was. How did any of this make it through QA?

To top it off, there's a year one cash grab pass, to add what? The other 20 hours of story that's missing that I already paid for? Multiplayer content? If i had known this was what I was investing in, I wouldn't have bothered.

It looks and plays like a game made 15+ years ago.

Besides a couple of quest threads, the writing is truly atrocious on every level, from the core narrative to side quests, to companions, to dialogue, pacing, suspense, all of it. Most of the quests are just fetch quests. Game mechanics across the board seem like they haven't even been tested, let alone balanced. The UI is a train-wreck. The NPCs look awful. Animations are laughable and why the hell do work benches need a loading animation? Bugs are everywhere. Textures are either just plain bad or poorly optimised. The colour shaders they've pasted over everything are just perplexing. Combat is half-baked; melee is unusable, two of the three weapon classes barely have any weapons and the rest aren't varied enough to bother using. The enemies are all the same, regardless of faction. The AI is terrible. Stealth doesn't work. Half the skills are filler and core game mechanics are locked behind several of them. Space combat is shallow, it basically comes down to you either have the biggest stick or you don't, there is no skill involved. The temples and power floating mini-game is a joke. Storage is a chore within the first hour. Outposts are somehow worse than Fallout 4. The star map is awful. The fact that towns don't have maps is hilarious, and if you're going to have topographical maps, why does it have so little detail? Everything is a loading screen, even tiny shops with one person in them.

The only thing that impressed me was the ship building, except again. The UI is bad, most of the HABs don't do anything, you can't preview layouts or select where doors go. There is no use for passenger slots besides transport missions which are pointless anyway because it's all loading screens. There isn't even a page or tool-tip that tells you what crew skills do and you can't even get more crew unless you dump points into social which is full of immersion breaking mind control skills that don't make any sense.

There is zero reason the game should run as bad as it does while being so dated. The fundamental problem is the engine and no amount of updates are going to fix it. If they were even releasing updates to begin with. In 6 weeks all they've done is patch out a vendor stash exploit which most people didn't know about and added an FoV slider that was already in the .ini file and that should have been there at launch. Nearly every one of the mods inside the first week of launch were fixes to UI, textures, shaders and bugs. How are modders able to do all this in a week and a 7.5billion dollar company can't do it at all?

The real kicker is that they've ruined the Bethesda exploration loop. Instead of stumbling from one unique POI to the next, you wade through loading screens and spend an age walking across barren moons only to find that nearly everything is a copy and pasted dungeon. Dungeons that are identical down to the last styrofoam cup. As an experiment I travelled through a series of high level systems to try and find content and every single static POI was just the same POIs I had already done, surrounded by more of the same automatically generated POIs. I then travelled to a system I knew had a settlement and encountered a mission so badly written I quit and haven't booted up the game again.

The only reason I have so many hours is because I kept restarting, thinking I was missing something. Looking for that old Bethesda magic only to realise that this is just a Fallout 4 re-skin, which was a Fallout 3 re-skin, which was an Oblivion re-skin. Except that they've ruined the one thing that made those games fun and as far as I can tell, they just don't give a damn anymore.

I wish all RPGs were even half as well thought out as this.

Exactly like Civ 5 was at launch, the game isn't finished.

Wait till all the DLC that contains the rest of the games functions is released and they throw out a 'legendary' edition and it might then be worth playing.

I still play this too much.