Homeworld 3 War Games takes the much-anticipated RTS and turns it into a roguelite

25.08.2023 - 17:03 / thesixthaxis.com / Into A

For any RTS fan of the late 90s and early 2000s, Homeworld remains absolutely legendary. At the time it pushed boundaries for 3D graphics in the genre, it came with defining controls that enabled fully 3D play in the zero-G void of space, and it featured sweeping narratives of ancient civilisations, rediscovery and destiny amongst the stars. Let’s just say two decades has been too long of a wait for Homeworld 3.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmQ56YpYaAA

Homeworld 3 will set off on a sweeping new galactic adventure, with the hyperspace network fraying around the edges as The Anomaly takes out planets and gates, threatening to plunge the entire galaxy back into darkness. Karan S’jet led a fleet off to investigate this, but with her disappearance, it falls to her successor Imogen S’jet to command another fleet to try and find Karan, to discover more about the Anomaly and to defeat it.

Alongside that there will naturally be online multiplayer and a regular skirmish mode, but the video game landscape has changed an awful lot in the last two decades, and Blackbird Interactive has cooked up an additional mode to lift some ideas from more modern trends. Yup, there’s a whole co-op roguelite mode known as War Games.

Funnily enough, the roguelite structure of starting out with basically nothing and building up until you’re a Whirling Dervish of doom for whatever enemies and bosses you encounter is actually a pretty good thematic fit for Homeworld. Just as in the original games, you’ll be building a fleet that you take from one mission to the next in the Homeworld 3 campaign, and War Games brings this together with the roguelite in a rather natural fashion.

Each run of War Games will throw you into a string of three relatively short missions, the first two allowing you to build up your forces, unlock a few upgrades and improve your burgeoning fleet, before the third and final mission acts as something of a boss fight.

There’s an engaging level of risk and reward here, as you jump into the map, quickly start gathering resources and fend off the initial waves of enemy ships, the Incarnate, that regularly spawn in. At some point, you’ll have to send your ships to an objective marker, triggering a mission goal that could range from escorting civilian ships to a jump point, destroying a particular Incarnate ship, or attacking an enemy convoy.

They’re relatively standard fare, but your attentions will be drawn in many different directions by those growing waves of attackers, as well as pockets of ships guarding artifacts. Send a ship through an artifact and you unlock a buff or perk to your fleet, boosting damage output, speed, and more of a particular class and ship type. They’re worth sniffing out, and you can stick