Homeworld 3 is for starship strategy sickos

One of the biggest advantages of the science fiction genre is that it gives us access to large spaceships. There’s other stuff too, about imagining alternative futures and pasts or thinking about new life forms, but there are a lot of big spaceships, and if you’re like me, you think those big spaceships are cool. Homeworld 3 is essentially a strategy game about very, very large spaceships and the cultures that pilot them. Based on that premise alone, you’re more than likely in or out.

These spaceships form the central organizational principles of the games. The first told the story of an oppressed people and their journey from a desert planet to their original homeworld, and the second was about dealing with a threat to that world in the form of a technological warlord. Homeworld 3 continues the story of the Hiigaran people, who face a new threat: something in space is killing off inhabited worlds and wiping out billions of people. The galactic empire is crumbling under the power of this faceless threat. Someone has to stop it.

The game puts the player in the combined shoes of Imogen S’jet, who is neurally welded to a massive spaceship, and Isaac Paktu, a military commander. They are sent beyond the known realms to find the threat, and they do so in their large space boats.

I edit the ships because they are cool. Homeworld 3 puts a lot of emphasis on scale and detail. Each mission takes place on these huge maps with huge, cyclopean structures surrounding them, and you complete each task in front of you by navigating that terrain and (generally) blowing up your enemy. The scale is so big that everything moves slowly. The pace of the game is generally icy.

At the same time, you have the ability to zoom in very far to see the actual action taking place. You can see your corvettes sweeping past an enemy destroyer in great detail, followed by torpedoes from a flanking ship you’ve pulled up behind the unsuspecting enemy. This zooming back and forth between scales produces the science fiction fan’s siren song. It’s like you’re watching Star Wars but with the ability to control everything, this time I’m the one who calls in the Imperial Star Destroyer against these ragtag rebels.

This is the fundamental tension of the game, and if you don’t buy into it, nothing else will get you there – not the story, nor the roguelike “War Games” mode, nor the multiplayer. Homeworld 3 is really a strategy game where you manage an army from the ground up. You choose the ships, you determine the army composition, you choose the routes they take to the enemy, and you must micro-manage their actions. Ship battles are no joke. Ships take more or less damage depending on what they are fighting, and their vulnerability to those enemies often depends on their exact positioning. Homeworld 3 assumes that you find it an interesting and engaging challenge to line up your ship formations, execute an attack in detail and then clear out the survivors. It assumes that you are willing to do that at a fairly slow speed, with a high level of detail.

Image: Blackbird Interactive/Gearbox Publishing

I have a high tolerance for strategy game nonsense. I’m even willing to deal with that nonsense in a fully 3D arena (which is no small feat – camera navigation is tricky in Homeworld 3, and there were a few moments where I just couldn’t click on something or select it due to camera weirdness). The level of detail that Homeworld 3 asked me to keep up was quite high, and at times my interest was undermined. Once I understand the solution to a problem in a game, and I understand how the execution is accomplished, I have very little patience for friction that gets in my way. This game gave me quite a few moments where I had the critical mass of ships needed to finish a mission, yet they were all the way on the other side of the map from my enemy. Note the long travel time to get there. Your enjoyment of this may vary.

The responsiveness of a given system is of great importance, and Homeworld 3 has a lot of moving parts. As in most strategy games, you direct your units in specific ways, but you also have to rely on their AI to navigate some of the beat-by-beat action. Smaller vessels need to maneuver, larger vessels need to hide behind obstacles, and each ship needs to have just enough independence so that it doesn’t get destroyed while you’re fixated on the map fighting a new battle. At times the AI ​​in this game felt really competent and able to do all of these things properly. Then there were other times when my ships seemed to stop dead, presenting big, chunky targets for my enemies. Homeworld 3 is complex enough and detailed enough that I was never quite sure if it was my fault or a problem with the game, and at these moments I would eventually have to do a full rundown of possible causes. Were my ships in passive mode? Did I not click on the enemy and just press the move command instead? Were they being collected, or perhaps planning to defend another vehicle? The granularity of the game makes me feel like I’m a real space commander. But being a space commander is tough, and at times it was quite a heavy cognitive load.

The real strengths of Homeworld 3 its consistency and, again, the focus on ships. The game’s story is beautifully animated in long, awesome cutscenes with a ‘big sci-fi concept’ and told through extensive in-game voiceover. Ultimately, it’s a story that will be familiar to space opera fans. One lone ship among the stars must find an enemy and defeat them. The enemy is more like us than we want to admit. Fighting is the only way to end it. Space battles are taking place. There’s nothing shocking here, but the Homeworld franchise’s dedication to depicting the logistics of hyperspace travel is compelling. Main character Imogen S’jet is neurologically tied to the ship she pilots, and it creates great storytelling opportunities both in cutscenes and during missions – for example, she verbally mourns when resource vessels die.

Image: Blackbird Interactive/Gearbox Publishing

It’s hard to be a supporter or a hater of it Homeworld 3. It’s a unique game, with a long-running story, and there are people who are really waiting for it. I found it to be a very engaging strategy game for the seven or so hours it took me to play through the campaign, and another few hours spent tinkering with the other game modes. If you haven’t invested in these games before, or if you aren’t purely electrified by the wargame pace of starship combat, Homeworld 3 might be hard to sell. The idea that games are ‘for their fans’ is silly, and that phrase is overused, but that’s really how I felt while playing it – for some people, this is peak gaming. For me it’s a solid experience.

This is not a convincing endorsement, and that’s just because I think Homeworld 3 is an acquired taste. I’m not sure that the casual strategy game player, not to mention any random person who enjoys games, would be willing to get over some of the game’s rougher points. It’s as polished and friendly as a game like this can be, but I think it can only meet you so far. At the end of the day, Homeworld 3 sells the fantasy of being a genius merged with the machinery of a spaceship that has constant vision and perspective of a vast 3D battlefield. The game captures this as perfectly as any game can, turning it into nail-biting, if plodding, gameplay opportunities.

You’ll have to take it the way you want. If you read this and think Wow, how have I never heard of this franchise? It sounds great! you are lucky. You have found your new calling. Personally, I’m now interested in going back to the Homeworld Remastered Collection to tie some more of this gameplay into a pretty good plot. And if you’re joining me, congratulations. We are now Homeworlders.

Homeworld 3 will be released on Windows PC on May 13. The game was reviewed on PC using a pre-release download code from Blackbird Interactive. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions on products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy can be found here.